Phil Robertson and shameful religion

It was released last night that A&E was going to reinstate Phil on his own show.  First let me tell you that I have nothing against Phil, the fact that he says ridiculous things is the only reason I know he exists in the first place.  The idea that A&E hired and pays him $6,000,000 per episode to be exactly who he is and then gets upset about it is a bit like the frog and the scorpion.

Now on to the shameful religious right.  In a statement released and cited in an article here, a group known as the Faith Driven Consumer stated (speaking of A&E) "Do they also now embrace the Biblically based values and world view held by the Robertson Family and the millions of Faith Driven Consumers?"

Are you really asking if the world embraces the views of Jesus, the guy they beat, spit on, drove nails through his hands and feet and then impaled on a spear after he was dead?  Secondly, what are faith driven consumers?  When I read the book of Acts, they seem to be giving a lot more then they are consuming.  My faith doesn't need any worldly possessions to drive it, I'm not sure about the millions of others out there.

Which is more angering, the ignorance of a Bible believe group or their greed.  To ever equate faith with consumption is a slap in the face to Christians throughout the ages.  Do you think a believer living underground in China, terrified that they will be imprisoned for their faith is excluded from the "millions of others out there" that are part of the faith driven consumers?  Do you think the homeless, possession less Jesus would be included in their ranks?

A&E is hypocritical and ignorant, but that is what they do.  They are a faithless, profiteering corporation, don't be angry at the scorpion for being a scorpion.  The Faith Driven Consumer group however, who knows what they hell they are which is a lot scarier.

Wives and Girlfriends

Most people treat their jobs like wives and their wives like girlfriends.

Why are we so concerned about quitting a job when it sucks the life out of us?  Why do we attach so much of our identity to our jobs?  Why do we selflessly pour ourselves into jobs with extra hours, the best of our efforts and try to never show up looking like a bum?

Why don't we get concerned when our relationship with our spouse is having the life sucked out of it?  Why don't we attach more of our identity to becoming "one" with our wife?  Why do we peel off the suite, put on the sweatpants and bum around our homes?

Maybe it's perfectly backwards.  Maybe your life will be fine if you leave your job and be ruined if you leave your wife.  Maybe.

Sleep around with jobs, break up with them and go for a hotter one.  When you get bored leave.  Try not to get abused by it or abuse it, but certainly use it.  Get a little selfish and get what you need out of it. Maybe.

Blast Emails 2.0

Seth talked about the downfalls of blast emails today, you can read it here.  It is a great read about how we market ourselves to large lists..

Seth's point on email blasts is if you don't have 15 seconds to personalize an email then why would I have 15 seconds to read it.  Great point.  But let me add a side note to it.

Corporate emails.

Corporate emails break every rule on Seth's list.  Imagine if you were in charge of corporate emails at a fortune 500 company and you had a very simple rule.  One email per day, and one extra "put out that fire" email per week.  That's it, six emails a week.  Imagine what that would do to the quality of emails going out.

The guys over at 37signals.com say to build a company like a museum, you don't get paid for what you put in but rather what you leave out.  Maybe we should apply that philosophy to more than building companies.  May the art of being a curator is an art worth pursuing in all of life.

Leadership trap

The collective we of writers and pundits discuss leadership so often you would think the whole country would be filled astonishingly good leadership (You can judge how many great leaders we have).  Many of us strive to be good leaders and eat up this vein of self help writing. But alas, this post is not about how to make great leaders or attributes you "must" have to be a great leader.

This post is because some of you are already good leaders.  And 100% of you great leaders are all going to do the same thing at some point: die.

Maybe you die as CEO of your company or maybe you get hit by a bus and actually die, not really the point.  The point is there is roughly a 100% mortality rate among great leaders which means that there is 100% succession to a new leader at some point.

There are clearly 3 types of leaders when it comes to succession:

1)  Salt the earth leaders.  The ones who only care about what they do and don't care about who will take over next.  To the extreme, they don't want to die a moment too soon so they will go out of their way to kill off any perspective new leaders.

2) Best intent leaders.  These leaders are a lot like parents, they want the best for the next leader and the best they can imagine is themselves but better.  Life is a graph, and the curve must continuously slope upwards.

3) Lastly there are leaders who bread leaders, not upgraded clones. Think Joshua and Moses.  Joshua was not Moses 2.0.  Think Joe Montana into Steve Young.  They breed the next leader, or more aptly, they help the next leader simply become who they already are.

So what kind of a leader are you?  Do different kinds of leaders work better in different situations or should every leader strive to be a level three leader?

The Long Con

Do you know what con man is, literally?  The con is short for confidence, a confidence man.  It was brought around in 1849 for somebody who builds your confidence and then uses it to defraud you of something.  There are a lot of different kinds of confidences used to rip people off, but one stands above the rest.

The long con.

The long con is intricate and complex.  It takes patience and perseverance.  We are all participating in a long con right now, it is quite literally our life.

Everybody in life wants to a confidence man: your business partners, your president and your pastor, your family.  Most don't know that they are con men.  Most don't even know what role they are playing in the confidence building or what/whom the payoff is for.  But they are players in the con and so am I.

Every time you tell somebody to go to college, to investment money, to get smart debt, to work smarter at their job, to work on their business not in their business, it's all confidence building that they are doing the right thing.  And yet so often, people are not doing the right thing.  So rarely are people just crushing it at life.

So when you are speaking to somebody, what are you building confidence in?  Because it is a thin line between being a confidant and being a con.

8 Why's, Church and Arcade Fire

We were having a long discussion about what church we wanted to go to.  Really long.  like three and a half months.  What's the deal with that.  I've been going to church my whole life.  For a long time during my youth my dad was a pastor of multiple home churches, I've spent more time in church than Jesus.  So what's with the discussion.

We've gone to a lot of kinds of church too.  The little home churches with one guy playing guitar.  The mega church with more people on stage than Arcade Fire.  The church where everything sucks but the preaching and the preaching is so good it makes it all worth while.  The church where you can't remember a single message but you never encounter a Sunday when you don't want to go.

So here we are again.  What church to go to.  And the bigger question now, the question we have never asked before, why?

This question has to be preempted by the idea that in our house we have already decided that going to church is important for a number of different reasons, so the discussion is not why go to church.  The question is why go to THAT church.

Have you asked that question deeply about any number of things in your life?  

1) Why call that place home? 

2) Why go to work there?

3) Why spend time with those people?

4) Why do that workout?

5) Why eat that diet?

6) Why read that book?

7) Why discipline that behavior?

8) Why drive that car?

You are already going to live somewhere, go somewhere to work, drive something to that place, interact with your kids, eat food, watch tv and read books.  All of those things are already going to happen tomorrow.  Most of the way we go about it is just because that's what we've always done.

Chatting with a Buddhist

We were talking about the difficulty of mixing the spiritual world and the physical world.  She told me a story about how she last saw her dad, he was sick and she was only with him for one more day.  She hugged him and said she would travel back to see him soon and he told her that wouldn't be necessary, that his time had come.  The next morning, while she was on the plane, he died.

He then appeared to her in a dream.  He took her the top of a mountain and told her to fly, and she was terrified.  She said, "I'm afraid of heights, and I'm a human, how can I fly?"  He just kept telling her again and again to fly.

She then told me that the hardest part about our physical bodies is that they are so heavy, that the spiritual body is weightless.

I think that is where I am right now.  I'm trying to understand why God is taking so much away from me.  But he isn't taking anything away from me, he getting me ready for flight.  He is unloading the baggage.  But the odd part is he doesn't want us to give up the physical world, he simply wants it to stop weighing us down.

Whiskey and the Lie of Life Lessons

We go through things in our lives, sometimes horrible things.  Then we sit down afterward and drink, sometimes horrible drinks.  Like Wall Street Whiskey.  I love whiskey and coke, and Wall Street is only $6.99 a bottle and it comes in a glass bottle so I don't feel like an urban outdoors man with an unbreakable bottle playing hide and go seek from a paper bag.  And it has a bad ass name like Wall Street Whiskey, which when you are a licensed financial jerk makes you feel something.    But it tastes like spoiled gasoline.  It burns, and coke doesn't help much, but it does the job of helping you start to unpack the horrible things that have happened.

So we sit and drink (or if we are really lucky we commiserate with somebody else who isn't chased away by the spoiled 85 octane) and start to dig out the bad things.  

Like the time our business partner left.  She came in and emptied out the business while we had all of our customers there.  She took all the clothes from our store and the seats from our lobby.  She took everything she could carry out while people just looked on.  After she left, and we closed up for the evening, my wife sat in the only seat left in our office and I sat on the desk and we cried.  We cried and then we stopped.  We decided that night that we were either going to close the business the next morning or go forward even stronger.

Three years later we shut the doors of that business on our own accord.  They were the most painful three years of my life.  We worked ourselves into the ground.  We had our first daughter and I don't remember much of the first two years of her life.  I drank heavily, hid in every dark hole I could find to hide and worked.

Afterward I talked about all the lessons I learned from that business partner.  All the lessons I learned from that business, from those lost years.  But the truth is those years were lost.  The pain was intense and if we had continued we would have divorced.  But we didn't continue, we quit, finally.  And quitting was good, but what happened was not good.  The lessons learned are often justification to continue doing things that we probably shouldn't be doing.

I don't want to continue learning lessons from pain, to keep putting lipstick on that pig.  I want to learn because I'm trying to learn, because I'm getting better not because bad things are happening to me.  I want to stop bad things from happening, not learn from them.

Sometimes things are just bad, and we should cry, and the next morning we should shut it down.  It's ok to quit today, you don't need to keep learning, just let yourself be ok.

How to escape the Rat Race, stop being a rat

The rat race.  We all know it, most of us participate in it.  We are told to go to school, sit in rows and pay attention.  If we do good enough we can pay a lot of money to do it four more years (or eight if your lucky).  Then if we do well there, we can start to get paid to sit in rows at the office.

School, career, family... death.

So the story goes.  This is always coming from people who are telling you to buck the system, to kick conventionalism to the curb and do your own deal.  Quit that dead end job and become an artist.  Don't be a follower.  It sounds so good, but the truth is the system is not at fault.  School and career and family are not the problem.

You are.  You are the problem.  Stop it. Stop being the problem.

The reason most of us are suffocating is not because of our job or family or school.  Its because we have built a water line in our lives so high that our noses barely sneak above it and every now and then we take in a breath of water and blame everything we can except ourselves.

The truth is, there are probably only two reasons you are unhappy.

1)  You have to much stuff

2)  You don't have the guts to be anything.

Let me explain.  The stuff thing is huge.  It usually starts with our calendar.  We have it filled to the brim and if your job is like my job, if it is not filled to the brim we add meetings to it so we can try and figure out how to get it more full.

Next we actually fill our lives up.  Usually this is two fold because it involves a lot of debt.  Debt is bad and makes you heavy like fat on the body.  I will only spend a moment on debt however, because debt is only part of the stuff problem.  I know somebody who is debt free, no car/home/school/credit card debt.  Nothing, nada.  Owns it all outright.  His house is full of garbage and is rarely clean because there is too much stuff.  He spends so much time fixing his stuff, upgrading his stuff, talking about the next thing he is going to get.  And again, this is somebody who has no debt, but they are still fat and weighed down.  What would happen if they needed to move, what a nightmare.

Secondly, you don't have the guts to be anything.  This is about so much more than a career or an accomplishment.  Most people I know dream about having a business or investment that "makes money while they are sleeping".  You've heard it.  I've said it.  The issue is we don't want to do anything, we want to be so well off we can do NOTHING.

This is where the line from Office Space comes in so well, "Well you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Just take a look at my cousin, he's broke, don't do shit."

I think we really do forget this, we don't HAVE to do anything.  We can all be Bartleby the Scrivener. 

(If you don't know who Bartleby is go to http://www.bartleby.com/129/, it will take you an hour tops and change your life.)

We all want to be so successful people will leave us alone, but we forget that to whom much is given much is required.  The more money we make the harder we need to work, forever.  If you are wealthy right now and you are only concerned about yourself you are a bad person, period.  If you have twenty dollars to your name you have the freedom to only worry about yourself most of the time.  That is simply the way it works.  And the scary truth is, if you have a job and live in America you are wealthy, you might be squandering it all, but you are wealthy.

better sex and authenticity

People talk about escaping a job, or the drudgery of working 9-5, or creating passive income so that they don't have to work.  I think they are all full of an idea that they are creating solely because they know it can't come to fruition.  They are imagining living a type of life that is an idea like porn, not a reality like having sex with your wife.  And the truth is, although we all know that having real sex is so much better, how many people do you know that work at having better sex with their spouse? Not just read magazines with 100 promises on the front, but do the actual work of having better sex?  The wild part is, if you ask most people, they would not be able to give one cemented example of something they could actually do to have better sex!  

And yet that is what society is thinking about all the time, but then collectively we just look at porn instead.  This is what the self help movement, betterment, multiple streams of income is for the vast majority of people.  It's porn for our imagination.  Then, just like porn, when we muster up the audacity to actually do something, it is so misguided and off target that we end up just hurting our chances of actual better.  Guys who see somebody doing something long enough and then want to do it to somebody they love and realize it only harms the relationship and possibility of having actual great sex.  

We see somebody hawking a proven system and how they earned a giant amount of money (I will leave the porn analogy up to you) and we take all of our money and try it and lose half of it and blame the market or the system instead of saying to ourselves "I did that to me".  

People in adult movies aren't having sex, they are acting.  

People selling investment systems are not investing, they are selling.  

People writing books about quitting their jobs are professional authors.  

Bloggers who focus on productivity are focused on readership.  

Magazines that show you how to get better abs are only watching the subscriptions sold matrix.  

What your paying for and what your buying is vastly different.

Whatever you are paying for is what is being tracked.

So is it all emptiness, is it all marketing and there is no way to get any real benefit or guidance in the world?

Seth Godin said when he post's a link to a book that somebody else wrote he gets 6x more clicks that when he posts about a book that he wrote.  That is because deep down we all know the difference.  When Seth post's about somebody else's book it's because it helped him, he is not selling, he is informing.  And becoming informed is what you want.  Finally we see both the person pushing and the person pulling desiring the same thing.

When we follow people who are only worried about themselves (and what I mean is not themselves making money but their own personal struggle for growth) there is an strange correlation to the purity of what they have to say.  David in the Bible wrote Psalms to himself, and they are some of the most beautiful poetry ever written about the pursuit of God.  Edgar Allen Poe wrote about the demons in his own mind, and in his writings we see a creativity that haunts our own minds from time to time.  The guys over at 37 Signals wrote programs that helped them do their jobs better, and they help us do our jobs better too.

It is a hard balance, because sometimes we are like the Counting Crows.  Their first successful album was about the pain and loneliness they were feeling when the album was birthed.  Their next album was much more upbeat because they had lots of money and friends from their previous album.  Critics dismissed the album and it took some time before they were able to come back to making music which was both authentic and touching.

37 Signals is now making applications to sell applications, it will be interesting to see what the next ten years looks like.  David stopped writing Psalms and indulged in his wealth and power, and it caused him great pain and irrevocable damage was done.

Authenticity is hard, but it is attainable.  Not only is it attainable, but there are so many of us that are desperate for your authenticity in our life long search for ourselves.  I heard a speaker recently say that we are in search of the person we already are in God.  When you are searching for that person you can help me find myself as well.  

admitting it

Have you ever talked to someone before 2007 who said "I got a terrible deal on my house" or "When I sold my house I really got hosed".  Everybody always got a great deal, if it's a buyer they were an early mover or nobody knew certain things that they knew.  If they were the seller somebody bought it right away or they held out for the right buyer...

The interesting thing is, in 2007, or 2008 or 2012 or whenever people finally bit the bullet and realized that they bought a ridiculously overpriced box to put their other boxes in, people finally started to admit that they had been hosed.  It was because the math was so aggressive nobody could spin it anymore.  I knew a lot of people who lost 40% of their house value.  If you are an average American, many people lost the equivalent of throwing away the next five cars they purchase.

But we are all so tied in to the belief system that includes owning a home that we just grind away.

I moved recently, I'm renting for a grand a month.  Throwing twelve thousand bucks a year down the toilet.  That is how much commission is paid out to real estate agents on the sale of a two hundred thousand dollar house.  I'm not hating on real estate agents, I'm just saying let's be careful about what we consider money down the toilet.

Or there is the roof I'm never going to replace.

Or the 1.3% average property tax rate I'm never going to pay.  That tax by the way is on an asset that is sometimes deprecating.  Imagine if after the stock market took a dive the government told you there was a tax on the gross amount of stock that you owned and they got to decide the value of the stock (whether or not you could sell it for that).  We accept this every year with our homes.

The relativity of money has been lost in two major areas for my generation, homes and education.  We throw ourselves into six figures worth of debt for both and neither are giving us anything.  We are wholesale working for the banks in this country, but hey, at least the rates are low.

The difficult part with renting is right up front you have to admit that you should probably get ahead in some other fashion.  But with home ownership, you can send that check off to the bank and feel like you are getting traction when in fact you almost never are.  The place I live now was purchased for $166k four years ago, the one right down the street (that is exactly the same because we are on original Americans) just went on the market for $95k.  I could rent at a thousand bucks a month for the next six years and that would only break me even, not including taxes, maintenance, realtor fees etc.

But you know what's crazy, I walked past the one that just went on the market, pulled out my cell phone and called the real estate agent.  I started feeling this romantic feeling about owning again.  I started thinking about how much cheaper than renting it would be...

We are brainwashed, I push so hard to try and put myself into situations that only hurt me.  I don't know how to unbrainwash.  I woke up at 5am panicked because I don't think I'm making progress in my life.  Is progress paying a bank most of an income I hate making?

the trolls in our heads

I was reading a great article on one of my favorites, Tim Ferriss.  It was a telegraph piece about an interview done before releasing his newest book, the Four Hour Chef.  The article was good, a fun read and an insight into the actual life that is born from the principles put forward in the 4 hour workweek.

The author's discussion was great of how he thought Ferriss would be an overbearing human machine focused on productivity only to find out that Tim takes four hours out of his day for an hour long interview.   The idea being, we open up time not just to fill it in more.

The most intriguing read was in the comments however.  I am guilty of scrolling down after I finish reading anything and touching on the comments, there is just something about trolls that gives my life balance and meaning.

A particular troll had three great points.  He went by the name reids.  This troll said Ferriss was a ripoff for cheating (there is a section of his first book where he wins at kickboxing by playing the weigh in game to an outlandish level, competing at a much higher weight than his rivals, and just shoving them out of the ring for a TKO).

Now this is not cheating, cheating is when you do something against the rules.  The following year the kick boxing association was so upset they changed the rules so you weighed in directly before the match, if he did it now he would be cheating, doing it then was just knowing the rules better.  Ferriss discusses the difference between getting what you want (just the outcome) or becoming world class at something (years of hard work).  The point seemed to be lost on the troll.

The second thing this pajama clad typist pointed out was that Ferriss was not really a NYT best seller because he got his "legion of followers" to buy copies just the right way to make sure he got on the list.  If you don't think that publishing companies haven't been doing this for years you must sleep with tinfoil on your head.  Secondly, anybody who has a "legion of followers" willing to buy books in any fashion is a NYT best seller, the entire moniker "New York Times Best Seller" is about your ability to sell books to legions of people.

Lastly, he talks about the Tango world championships and how Ferriss just stands there while a pro dances around him, I'm not sure if you've ever seen Tango but that is the point.  Also, isn't Dancing With the Stars just this concept put into action for like ten seasons now?

All of this troll bashing has a point however, and that is the troll lives inside of our head.  The troll in reids case just escaped through his fingers for five minutes after he read that article.  The troll tells us three things, your a cheater, your riding other peoples coattails, and your a fraud.

If you are not cheating you are not paying close enough attention is something put forward by Seth Godin in Purple Cow.  He talks about how an airline who has employees not in a union is cheating and winning because of it.  The point is, where is the fat that has always been there and how can you cut it when everybody else says that it is impossible, that is cheating.  The first time somebody does something new it's cheating, the second time it's revolutionary and the third time is just back to competing the way it's always been done.

Riding other peoples coattails is such a strange thing to fear because it is the hardest thing to do.  Building a tribe and then working together with them is the new economy, and using that tribe to accomplish things is literally why you build it.  I've seen Tim Ferriss use his tribe to work his way on to the NYT best seller list and then turn around and use his tribe to raise six figures for kids in school.  I've bought all three of his books and my life is better because of it, not worse.

Lastly, being a fraud and diminishing what you've already done.  The troll in my head plays this card a lot.  We get energy from momentum, we get energy from having done before, we produce art from energy not from inspiration.  Therefore, the best way for the resistance to keep us from making art and putting ourselves out there is to kill the energy, crush the momentum.

You can do the work, you are allowed to Tango, even poorly if you want.  You can write about it, talk about it and face the trolls.  The truth is, the trolls that will come find you if you ever reach fame are just a shadow of the troll you have to fight in your own head everyday you set out to do something meaningful.  Fight the troll, reids sucks, and go do the work.

my pop-pop

Grandfathers

Like most of you I had two grandfathers.  There was my cool grandfather and my uncool grandfather.  Neither were near me for any major part of my childhood, one grandfather lived close during high school but other than that it was thousands of miles.  They were my grandfathers, so I guess I knew them, but one I knew a lot better and one not so much.

My moms dad was not very cool.  I did not know him very well.  His pants never touched his shoes, I don’t know if it was always like that but it was for as long as I could remember.  He would read the newspaper every day from beginning to end.  They called him Pop-Pop, but I never got comfortable with that so I just called him grandpa.  He wasn’t a big fan of noise and until I was twenty two that’s all I was really good at.

He was the older of my two grandfathers, he died at age eighty nine, my freshman year of college, it was track season and my mom told me not to come to the funeral.  His wife died when I was an infant, I’m told I am a lot like her and I’ve cried about never meeting her.

He lived in a giant house outside of Washington DC in the richest county in the United States, but he was never wealthy.  He ran a plumbing company, it lasted forever, my uncle took it over, then it just kind of closed one day and now it doesn’t exist anymore.  He wasn’t that much fun to talk to as a kid, he was so quiet and very serious.  He was just barely too young for WWI and just a little old for WWII.  There are three stories that sum him in my mind and paint the picture of the most important man in the life of the most important woman to me.  I wonder what my three stories would be.

The first story was how he ran the plumbing business, it was just a small town operation and he was the owner back when that meant something.  It was the fifties, sixties, seventies and on.  This was during the height of all things race, and Washington DC was not insulated from the havoc.  He used to hire black men to work for him, and he would go out of his way to make salaries known, because it was important to him that everybody knew he paid his black employees the same.

The second story is short and sweet.  My mothers kindergarten class was the first year they desegregated schools, she remembers it being stressful, she was five years old.  My grandfather, a white business owner who owned a large house and had three beautiful children, whose pants did not touch his shoes, would go into town and sit down to eat with his black friends.  They never got service.  I guess they call those sit ins.

The last story is my favorite.  I spent a month with him in India, he was helping to oversee a hospital being built.  We lived right on the site, the city had three million people in it and there were only five of us white folks, in the whole city.  This was when he was in his seventies.  

He had an acre of land and would mow it into his eighties with a push mower.  He always ate big macs and he was thin until the day he died.  He was once mowing the lawn and had a heart attack, he didn’t want to inconvenience anybody so he drove himself to the hospital.

On his deathbed, at eighty nine years old, he spoke his last words, “I have more work to do”.  I miss him really badly, he would be turning a hundred this year.  He mattered, and the blood that runs through my veins is from his, I hope I matter.  The last one on one conversation I had with him I got into a fight because I told him he was being hard headed.  He was, I’m sorry grandpa and thank you for being so damn hard headed and uncool.

Guaranteed on time and on budget, 2 steps

Here are the two steps to always shipping your art, your product, your service on time and on budget

1) Ship when run out of time

And/or

2) Ship when you run out of money

The more you treat life like this, the better the end product will get and it will still be on time and on budget.  Or just admit to yourself that you actually don't care about the timeline or going over budget.

Preparation or Bombing Irag

I don't know if it is being properly prepared or if it is preemptive, but I do know after the whole preemptive war on Iraq thing that preemptive carries a lot of baggage so we will just go with prepared.

Saddam in the good old days before the beards and spider holes

I am not very good at being a person.  I mean, it's hard to get stuff done, most days just fly past me and the simple stuff seems like the hardest.  Eating good food, going to bed before 2am, not hitting my kids to much (just kidding on the last one, only one of my kids is old enough to get hit and she gets hit just the right amount).

But that is when I realized it is not about doing the right thing, it's about the preparation.  I love Tim Ferriss and one of his main points throughout all three of his books is that environment means more than discipline.  I agree, but I still struggle getting the right environment together.  Then it struck me this morning, if done correctly you are doing everything in preparation and almost nothing when it comes due.

Let's take two examples, eating and raising your kids.

So when I get up in the morning I need to get some protein in my system within thirty minutes of waking up, but I'm not hungry.  What I've realized is, it doesn't matter if I'm not hungry, I'm not eating for right now but preparing for 10am when I haven't eaten, been up for a few hours and now am hungry.  Because then I still don't eat until lunch and at that point I'm all shaky and the only thing that will level out my system is some processed carbs, a lot of them, and now.

Or do you ever see parents of teenagers marvel at their one friend who has teenagers who behave themselves.  The common question I hear is "How do you make them listen?".  The truth is, I was once a teenager, you can't make them listen.  Teenagers are clinically stupid and somehow self aware of that fact and proud all at the same time.  

The way you get good teenagers is by creating a relationship with little kids who are pretty much just boring.  You play with a four year old for hours doing nothing.  You teach an eight year old how to play a sport even though they suck at it.  You talk to a ten year old about their feelings even though how they feel about another ten year is really trite.

I don't do any of this.  But I think I can do better when I realize that I don't need to do something right now, I can do something for the future, and the more I do in preparation the less discipline I need and the easier it will be that when the moment comes I don't have to be smart, I already was.  It also takes a lot of work up front, because for a little while you have to prepare for the future and put out the fires of not preparing in the past.  Just stay focused, do something small that makes your life better later right now, then again in a couple hours.  I believe in you/me.

Good talk, see you out there.

Sleeping

You can only observe how you were sleeping once you are awake.

This thought comes from C.S Lewis and was passed to me from a friend during a conversation.  The real question that this begs then is, are we asleep or awake?  I recently watched the Matrix movies again and the beauty of this pervading idea plus a bunch of awesome kung-fu is worth the six hour trilogy.

We must be willing to sacrifice everything to wake up.

"Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange." Inception

Dying for trash

Seeing is the first step.

As we drove through the trash, it continuously smoked and there were cows that only ate trash.  The teenage girls were dis-attached, as if the windows were television screens.  But when the door opens and you smell it then the show ends and you actually see it.

Impact = Feeling

That was the first note I made in my little red notebook that rode around that trip with me.  I knew that the impact was heavy and even devastating, but how do you change that impact into action and not let it die as a flame up of feelings?

We walked around the dump for a little while, the rolling hills of trash dotted with people picking through it and the cows.  The dump is the other side of consumption.

We met the kids.  They smiled, laughed, drew pictures for us.  One drew a picture for me, I remember sitting there with my arm around him watching him draw and he gave me the picture as a gift.  I still have it.  As of right now I couldn't tell you whats on the picture even though I've looked at it a dozen times, it has green marker.  I'm not sure what the drawings are but I know the dark smudge of dirty residue left on the page on the bottom right where he had rested his body.  That residue from the dump, getting on a plane, flying back thousands of miles, driving on highways stuffed with expensive cars, sitting in my house, my house, under my roof.  That smudge now lives in perpetuity between sixty eight and seventy two degrees.

A woman who escaped the dump said every day she hoped to find a treasure in the trash, something so big it would solve all of her problems and she could leave and live in luxury.  She was born in the trash, they think it's five generations now but they don't keep great records at the dump.  Generations move quickly when you have kids at twelve and die at thirty.

The week I got back I went to a corporate meeting on the top floor with catering.  There were seventy five of us, filling up our lives meeting with each other so we could call it work.  The speaker talked about how he went on a normal sales call and ended up closing a deal that he pulled six figures from, a single deal!  For years in my life I had been hoping to find that treasure in the trash.  I did it in a suite and silk tie over expensive lunches and afternoon drinks.  Some of us still die at thirty because it's stressful, I only got an ulcer.

That woman escaped, and lives in a luxury she did not even know existed, freedom from the dump.  Sometimes release is the only thing we really need to allow us to receive.

Impact = feelings, but how do we turn those feelings into actions that mean something.  Harness the power to come back.  I've left much of the treasure hunting behind but one thing I have not left behind is the impact of that day and the promise to be back.

5 Reasons The Pope is Communist

I would not consider myself to be the biggest Catholic (in the sense that I'm not a catholic at all), but much like we all become when the Olympics roll around and curling lights up our televisions, every four years we all become experts.

To that point, I think this new pope is a communist.  I've been reading up on Jorge and honestly he freaks me out a little.

1)  He named himself Pope Francis after Francis of Assisi.  That guy was not even part of the church as a priest, he was just really poor and prayed a lot so they priested him (not sure if that is the term, again I haven't been a Catholic expert since 2005).  Jorge was recently quoted as saying ""Oh how I would like a poor church and a church for the poor".

2) He is from South America. I'm American and I am pretty sure that everybody south of us is now communist (except for Chile because they have great skiing).

3) He's a Jesuit (no not the West Virginia punk band from '95).  Jesuits are Catholics but believe in education and science, that sounds pretty communist.

4) Communists love titles, his full official title is:

His Holiness Pope Francis, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church,Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman province, Sovereign of the State of the Vatican City, Servant of the Servants of God.

5) He sold his his huge mansion when he took over in Buenos Aires and moved into an apartment using the money to help the poor.  He rode the bus in to work from said apartment.  Even after the white smoke puffed he rode the bus with the riff raff cardinals back to where they were staying instead of taking the pope mobile out for a test drive.

Here's where the Archbishop of Canterbury used to live until it became the new religion, a country club

So there you have it, but in all honesty, I'm not sure how you could be a good pope and not be communist.

Most of the book of Acts in the Bible sounds awfully communist to me.  Sell what you have to help those with less, eat all your meals together, don't exalt the rich inside of the church.  This Pope Francis sounds like the real deal, and I'm ashamed to say it but the Catholic church looks like it might be practicing what it preaches, maybe it's time to reform the evangelicals here north of the communists.

Dave Grohl and Crappy Christian Art

Dave Grohl is awesome, take fifty minutes out of your day and watch this, his keynote from sxsw, lot's of F-bombs so don't watch it on your phone in church or you will feel bad.

David Eric Grohl

Dave is awesome, his music is awesome, his story is awesome.  I think he is so authentic because he actually is.  In the aforementioned speech that you can find here, (seriously, watch this) he says one major theme,

the artist comes first

I think this concept is wild when it comes to really crappy christian art.  Think about how David, the rock star who wrote all those songs in the middle of the Bible.  David knew that the artist came first.

Half the Psalms are David bitching about how hard his life is, and go read them his life was hard.  But he would complain by creating art and then tap back into the source to keep fighting and keep creating more art.  In my book David was known for two things, being a song writer and kicking ass.

And what are Christian artist's known for today, a false humility that covers the fact they won't expose themselves out there or their art.  At one point in the speech Grohl says "I was no longer one of you (pointing at the crowd) I was one of us (he points at himself)".  He is speaking to becoming a punk rocker and the idea is startling.  He openly and happily separates himself from the world.  My Bible has some passage in it talking about being in the world but not of the world.  It's a shame I have to go to f*****g Dave Grohl to see that best exemplified in modern culture.

The final thought is that Nirvana, according to Grohl, was "three people playing like their lives depended on it".  When was the last time you saw somebody acting like that, look at that picture of Grohl above again, do you see any part of his heart, his soul, his mind or his strength going anywhere but into that music.  You can feel the music from looking at the picture.

I don't know who this guy is, but I don't think Dave Grohl would like him.

A list of one ways to be the MOST successful

I remember hearing a speech by the most successful guy at a company. He was the guy, number one, grossing seven figures a year in his forties.

Number one.

He said people always asked him why he was so successful, he was not good looking, did not come across as particularly smart etc. He said succeeding was hard, and sometimes it felt bad to do the things required to succeed because they were so hard. He then said THE reason why he was successful.

He felt more bad, more often, than anybody else.

What if success never gets easier, what if what it takes to win feels bad forever?

I say go for it, I mean look at Steve Jobs, he seems happy and he earned ten figures.

The Doing Thing

I wrote this is 2009, still good and sitting it the drafts folder, hope it helps you as much as it helped me:

A recent Ted talk got me thinking, you can see it here, about how children interact with the world. My Theory of Everything is that everything is everything so you can succeed by knowing one thing immaculately. We often think that the one thing we should know should be important, and yet understanding something simple is easier and, as stated, something simple is everything.

Children are simple, maybe they hold the key to how we should act. In the video, there is a team building design exercise and the average kindergarten team out performs the average team of CEO's. Kindergarten students do it by iterative learning.

My wife ran Sunday school classes this weekend where all of the students gather together, just like the adults, and sing before heading off to individual classes. Except when they showed up that day, instead of singing, they had to all dance. Everyone participated exceptionally.

If you showed up at an adult church service (board meeting, project orientation, etc) and told everyone they had to dance I would be shocked to see 10% involvement. So whats the correlation between design and dance?

Fear.

As adults we are ready to put out a big design and fail (if we have to), shrug and say we did our best, and quit. Kid's do their best too, but they do it quickly and realize that it is not the best and continue trying. And the trying is where they beat us.

In school we teach the adult way: hand in one paper, do one art project, pick one sport, choose one college.

School is wrong, so wrong that in the design exercise recent MBA's did the worst.

School teaches us fear, and going into the business world teaches us fear plus money. It's time to dance, look a little stupid, realize our first try is not the best way, push past the fear and go again.

Drugs, Jesus and 90's music

I'm focusing on worship this month and that usually starts and ends with twenty minutes and four songs on Sunday morning for Christians, change that, most Christian men.  So let's start there.

That guy

Last Sunday there was a great worship session.  We have recently started going to a new church in our new hometown, it's about three minutes away from our house which means we are only five minutes late.  My wife and I play a game where you take anything good and you call it a creation of two other things that had a baby.  Like my 4 year old daughter has hair that looks like the lion king and little mermaid had a baby.  Or Kale is when lettuce and boring had a baby.  This church has a worship pastor that sounds like hootie and the blowfish had a baby with mumford and sons, in my opinion.  Kelsey thinks he sounds like our old worship leader had a baby with John Goodman.  Either way, this worship team is great.

So they go through there thing and they sing a great Michael W. Smith song and then out of the blue they crush a little song called "Lullaby" by Shawn Mullins.  It was like awesome had a baby with the 90's.  And here we are.  The best of the best Christians are ten to fifteen years behind everybody else.  I have a reason for this.

The progression of the average Christian is based on age and nothing else.  When you meet a normal forty year old Christian sitting in church on Sunday, getting ready to get back in the minivan and go home to watch golf, that guy used to be cool when he was a sinner.  He watched cool movies, got drunk and had feelings.  He used to sleep with his wife because he liked her and listened to music because it did something.  That guy is now full steam in the system, and has not done anything new in ten years.  But he wants to feel something because he is in fact, still a creation of God, no matter how much he abandons living.

(as a very side note, I miss spelled abandons so badly that the first suggestion on spell check was boondocks, I actually saw a tear fall from my English Literature degree)

Thus, he goes back to what he knows, and right now what that guy knows is music from 1995.  As an ugly side effect, he starts to have feelings again but since he has not really felt anything in ten years he just has the feelings that died when he was twenty eight, so he wants to run a marathon and start a business.

And mind you, this is the good stuff.  This is the best of what we have to offer, there are some sects of Christian music that were never good, just like a women in a denim romper.

So what is the culprit and what can be changed...  Well I think there are a few issues, let's start a list.

1) Church worship pastors are the only musicians who get paid an adequate wage, imagine if all of the music at the grammy's was created by middle school music teachers.  Musicians either make way to much or way to little, and that is where the art thrives.
2) The listeners are broken, as discussed above in regards to fifteen years ago.
3) We are afraid to offend (we Christians) and the truth is some Christians are offended by feeling anything because they are hiding in cultural Christianity as cover not as salvation.
4) Worship is about being a blessing not being blessed and we actually don't know how to do that.

So here we are, where the edge is singing Shawn Mullins, the cutting edge, and we are singing worship songs to a guy who partied with hookers, mocked the reigning super power and literally raised ten year old girls from the dead (something Justin Beiber has gotten close to doing but is yet to accomplish).

What are we doing?

Many of us are readers, who will open a new book, read a blog post every morning and through all of the reading have a desire to find.

I remember when my business was plummeting, my life was full of pain, struggle was my existence.  At the time I was working at an airline as a baggage handler where I would work back to back shifts for two and a half straight days so I could get 5 eight hour shifts in and still have four and a half days to work at my failing business.

The job was manual labor and I would wear cargo pants so I could carry around a book in my pocket.  Anytime the work would pause, in between flights etc, I would just sit where I was and read.  I read a lot of Grisham, a lot of the Bible, Machiavelli, and much more.  In an ironic turn, I read the Four Hour Work Week there for the first time there, and then a few more times!

I remember diving into a new book hoping there was an answer.  The Four Hour Work Week was brand new and I thought maybe I was catching a wave before anybody else.  Machiavelli was not new, but I thought maybe there was a jewel inside that was now powerful in a changed world.  The craziest part is all of the books I read did have the secrets, did have the nugget I needed.  It just turned out that it was like finding a check for a million dollars while stranded in the woods, it's worthless.

So much of our lives are spent searching and yet what do we do when we find?  I remember sitting at the kitchen table looking Kelsey in the eyes and deciding to close down our business.  I knew it was the answer, the right thing to do, it would give us freedom and the ability to succeed so much more than if we kept it alive.  That being said, two nights ago, probably three years later to the day, I woke up bathed in sadness over the closing of the business.

I was vividly dreaming of the faces I used to see everyday, and my heart slumped over the side of the bed, its face in its hands.

Many of us are looking for an answer, but not many people are advising us to pay attention to what we are doing.  If you are taking a pill to feel better that just means you are taking a pill to feel better, it doesn't matter if a doctor prescribed it to you.  If you are living without purpose do you really think that having sex with somebody will help with purpose, your just having sex with somebody.  And on the other side, if your whole world hurts and you are still closing down a business because that is the right thing to do does it matter how you feel?

Pay attention to what you are doing.

That being said, I've hidden inside of a lot of things because I refused to admit what I was doing somewhere else.  Sometimes what I was hiding inside of was the thing I needed to change... but all I care about now is the doing.

To the best of my knowledge there are a few people out there who get this, but very few of those few people are Christians and that bothers me.  It bothers me because we should be the ones who know what to do, we had a pretty good example.  And it really bothers me because I could use the help personally.

Quitting Christianity

Seth Godin had an amazing post recently about those people.  The idea is that many leaders believe there is a chunk of society destined to be those people, or as Seth describes them:

You know, the people who will flip burgers or sweep streets or fill out forms all day. The ones who will be brainwashed into going into debt, into buying more than they can afford, to living lives that quietly move from one assigned task or one debt payment to another. If they're lucky.

The truth is that the group that is the worst at this is corporate Christianity.  Christian leaders who think the members of their church are only capable of paying down debt so they can tithe more, serving by helping park cars at the most and sitting quietly in the pews one day a week.

Do you realize in the Bible they voted a guy in charge of the canned food ministry named Steve and this guy kicked so much ass that somebody who later wrote half the new testament murdered him.  That is a heck of a canned food ministry.

When England had gone too far a small group of people split off and eventually started the United States of America, when the Catholic church had gone too far a guy named Luther split off and and eventually the 500 Club was started.  The question for today is, is it time to quit Christianity and start following Jesus again?

To the best of my recollection, Jesus only used those people, Jesus was one of those people.

Suburbanites and why I'm special

This idea of individuality in the United States right now is amazing.  The vast majority of people between the ages of 30 and 60 live exactly the same and pride themselves on individuality.  I know a really sweet couple that are living in Portland, fighting the system, being individuals.  They are vegan and very cutting edge.  I know another couple that live deep in the burbs in Colorado who are extremely dull edged, eating lots of refined white carbs and processed meat-like substances.  They are extremely worried about how they are doing as parents and love doing work on their house because it really spotlights who they are as individuals.

All of this to say, both couples would probably be upset if you told them they were the same.  I think the one couple in Portland fights against the current sometimes and the other couple seem to be just letting the riptide take them out to sea but both are heading in the same direction.

The question I am wrestling with recently is that intentions mean very little.  If you intend on fighting the system but you wake up at forty with two poorly behaving kids, a late model car, three hundred thousand dollar house, a job you don't enjoy going to, only consuming with very little contributing, does it matter how you vote, what cool tattoos you have or what drugs you did in your twenties?

If you end up in a box in a row, driving an audi instead of a Cadillac, consuming fixed gear bikes (heavily used in artistic cycling) instead of bed bath and beyond does it matter?  And I say it in a very general sense, does it matter?

I don't understand why the hipsters of our generation are completely ignoring the hippies of the last generation?  Hippies who are broke, ailing in health, leaning heavily on the system they fought and generally coated in a great malaise about how things used to be.

This all being said, I am not sure what we are supposed to do in our twenties and thirties to fight this outcome, but I'm working on that and dammit, that makes me an individual.

Riptide

I took a roadtrip this past week down from Olympia to Portland and then across to the 101 all the way to San Francisco.  The trip was long, fun, slow and an intensely American experience.  One of the stops we made in Oregon had a warning sign about what to do if you are caught in a riptide and being pulled out into the ocean.  The advise is to swim sideways, because if you do nothing you could end up miles out to sea and if you try to fight the overwhelming current you will only exhaust yourself.  Swimming sideways is counter-intuitive, but getting out of the overwhelming current is all that is important.

The current that is society pulls so strongly on us that we often feel the need to fight against it, or to just give up and see where it takes us.  Both are bad ideas.  We must exit the current all together, swimming sideways.  I'm not totally sure how to do this practically but tomorrow we will dig deeper into Portland, fighting the current and hipster suburbanites that are just part of the system.

5 pains of changing

Changing is simply hard to do. Right now we are in the middle of massive change, we are moving from Denver to Seattle, I am changing how my job is done and what my future responsibilities will be, and my wife is changing the leadership in her very successful non profit to accommodate the move. This in conjunction with the fact that when you move somewhere new you literally have to change everything, I mean do they have grocery stores in Seattle?

1 - Change is hard because we don't know what is coming down the road. Seth Godin once had a great post about doing tomorrow over because most of us know exactly what tomorrow is going to look like already.
2 - Change means stretching yourself, it exposes what you don't know. When you literally have to pack up your life and move it that means getting at boxes that have not been touched in years. Sometimes the simple act of seeing what is in that box is exhausting.
3 - Change means stress testing areas of your life. When you make a large change you are going to put the stress of that change on our relationships, both personal and spiritual. My wife's family is fine when we are watching football together not talking about the emotional boundaries that have been put up over the last decade and a half, but when they know you are taking away their grand babies there is a stress test on what the relationship can handle.
4 - Change forces optimism or pessimism. When you are pushing into the unknown you must have a feeling about what is going to happen, that feeling that bubbles up is how you view the world. It is scary how often those feelings get to stay in our subconscious and we think we are just operating without emotion.
5 - Change usually leads to more change. When you get married you usually have to move, then at some point you have kids, etc. Change is beautiful because it forces growth but if growth is terrifying and you are pessimistic then change simply breeds more fear.

So there you go, just go ahead and put your fears out there and look at them. An exercise that I have been focused on through this incredibly stressful week has been naming my fear, putting a Bible verse against it and then anchoring that verse with a physical action, such as a nod or a deep breath. My fear is letting down my wife, my verse is "fear not because I am always with you" and then I grab my arm or my leg or my shoulder and squeeze it for second like a coach would do after he gives you instruction.

Go make a huge change, but don't be stupid about it, change is hard and you have to be ready to into a fight, but as "Fight Club" taught us, fighting is living.