Dr. Phil Punxsutawney and Jesus

I was watching Dr. Phil, that picture is not Dr. Phil.  That is Dr. Phil Punxsutawney appearing on Conan.

The real Dr. Phil was interviewing somebody who had left their daughter in the care of a pedophile church leader who claimed he was Christ in the flesh.

The interesting thing about people who claim to be Jesus is they never act like Jesus.  And then Jesus tells us to act just like him.

I think acting like Jesus and not telling anybody is harder than any of us really want to admit in a society that keeps us moving on the fuel of pride.

Don't pretend either, even Dr. Phil Punxsutawney knows what Jesus doesn't look like.

Amazing marinated chicken and success

This is my first how to post with hopefully a slightly larger message.

I have a hard time eating healthy because I'm super lazy.  Lately I have been working on this by making it easier to eat healthy than unhealthy.  The main way of doing this is by doing something once a week that takes an hour and then helps all week.

I take the above ingredients sometime mid week and throw them all together to marinade. It's just whatever seasoning you like, I use 21 seasoning from traders Joe's, some garlic paste, some Worcestershire sauce, lime juice and some cut up green onions.  I just put a little of everything on, lay another piece of chicken thigh down and repeat.

It takes fifteen minutes.  Most people are grossed out by chicken thighs as I used to be but there are two major advantages to using them.

1) Cheap
2) Fatty (which is why people don't like them)

The benefit of the fattiness is you can kill them on a grill AND reheat them later and they are always flavorful without being all dry.

So that takes 30 minutes.  Then a few days later (whenever I run out of the chicken I am currently eating), I take all the chicken, grill the junk out of it (I like the blackened smokey flavor and it breaks down the fat) and chop it up into little pieces.  Then I have a bunch of ready to go chicken all the time.

While it's grilling I take a whole head of lettuce and chop it up, clean it, and put it in a container.

Then, whenever I'm super lazy, I just throw some lettuce, chicken, cheese and whatever else I feel like in a bowl and I'm eating in 60 seconds.

Now it doesn't taste like this:

But it's pretty good, and again, it's actually easier than any bad food I have around that has to be cooked.

The moral of the story is this; Life takes a little prep, that's just the way it is but do it on a day when you are doing other fun stuff not a day that is already stacked.  I try and grill on Sundays because I'm just sitting around watching football and drinking.

Secondly, make the good decisions easier than the bad decisions.  If you have a hard time doing something, stuff it inside of something you really enjoy doing.  If you hate doing something, at least make it easy.  If you don't have time to do something find something else you don't enjoy doing but is a habit and replace it.

So go do a little work and shoot for some big results, and remember to eat mor chikin.

Idea Baby

I've often read the comparisons between childbirth and ideas.

My two favorite are that a really good idea has to come from the merging of two separate parents, both bringing something to the table and then together they make this brand new thing.  The other is that ideas are like a pregnancy and it takes a long time and it's painful and then you birth something new.

I think both of those are good, but both are too focused on the baby.

When a woman is pregnant with a baby it is verging on unbelievable the things she has to go through.  She gains 30% body weight in a very short period of time.  Her body literally contorts to hold this baby.  She creates more hormones in the nine months of pregnancy than she will produce in the entire rest of her life, combined!

We think about the baby so much that we forget that in the process we are the mother.  We are the ones waking up in the morning and vomiting.  We are the ones that have to let our bodies be wrecked by this idea while it just does it's thing.  We are the ones that have to change how we eat, what vitamins we consume and what coffee and alcohol we don't.

Most women who have abortions don't do it because they don't want children, there is always adoption.  No, they have an abortion because they know what that baby will do to them over the next nine months.  It will wreck them.

Be careful about how romantic you get about what it takes to bring an idea to fruition.  Bringing an idea to life will wreck you, but creation is why we resemble God.

helpful or hurtful

I've probably only said that fifteen hundred times, I started saying it to my daughter when she was two or three.  I've recently started saying it a lot to myself.

When you start on a task, is it helpful or hurtful?
How about how you are thinking about that thing?
What you are eating?
The people you are surrounding yourself with?

Twice in the last week people told me they were being helpful why they were actively hurting what I was working on.  It is a simple question, because sometimes it's not as big of a deal as whether it is right or wrong, but it's still a pretty big deal.

A Little Bit Better

A little bit better comes in three phases.

Phase one is when you have just started something, you are a beginner and every time you spend time in practice you get a little bit better.  The exciting part is that sometimes you get a lot better in a very short amount of time, but you never get worse.  If you are practicing you are getting better.

Then you are in the middle.  You have done something for a while and there are good days and bad days but you know what you are doing.  Getting a little bit better in the middle is harder because it does not happen automatically.  If you show up and do bad reps, you may actually get worse.  And during the middle you almost never see huge leaps, giant gains.  Most people stay in the middle because it is hard to get better, and nobody criticizes the person in the middle.

But mastery, that stage is the hardest.  Mastery says that you need to work exceptionally hard to get a little bit better, but when you do get a little bit better you are adding that one or two percent onto a giant base and it feels great.  The amazing marathon runner that runs for over two hours and gets a personal best by only forty seconds: that forty seconds means the world.

The difference between the middle and mastery is seeking out the weak points, finding the faults and then working inside of those uncomfortable spots.  The beginner and the person in the middle hate those spots, and their ideal of mastery is that they no longer find those pain points.  But the master loves those pain points, because only when they find those can they get better.

The Bible has a line "where your heart is, their will your treasure be also". Everybody wants the treasure now, and when they get the treasure then they will commit their love, desire and work. The guts that it takes to aim your heart at finding weakness, and then truthfully analyzing yourself, that is where the masters heart is and that is why she gets the treasure.

Gravity and Choosing

It won a bunch of Oscars years ago, so I decided to keep on the cutting edge of culture and watched the film Gravity two years after it came out.

I may have more thoughts on this later but my major thoughts are tied around doing.  The beautiful idea that we so often live our lives right on the outskirts of all of humanity and yet totally alone.  Nobody can hear us, see us or help us but we are most certainly here.  It hurts exist sometimes, it's hard and we all just want to go to sleep, and on the outskirts of humanity it is so easy to just drift off.

Sandra is both born is space and baptized on her re-entry to earth.  The process is painful and difficult and many times we just want to drift off but we have to choose.  Choose to live life.  Choose to fight and survive and get up.

I've spent year after year getting rid of things.  I got rid of a gripping addiction, I got rid of so much guilt and pain, I got rid of many of my earthly desires surrounding success, I got rid of my debt, I got rid of my business's, and I got rid of most of my earthly possessions.

But at some point you have to choose life.  Not just to fill it up with shit, not just to pile on work for work sake or drive for prides sake.  No, you have to choose something after the emptying, then you have to fight like hell to do that thing.  And in the process you will go through so much pain, lose things you don't think you can live without and keep driving forward.  Just keep driving.  You are Abraham in the desert, going to a place you will know only when you get there.  Keep going.

I took a couple of weeks off and stopped going.  Nothing more dramatic then I just stopped caring, starting drinking and sleeping, stopped looking my family in the eyes.  When you turn off the oxygen and drift off to sleep you fade really, really fast.  Don't do it.  Burn up in the atmosphere.  Freeze to death in space.  But for God's sake, do not turn off the oxygen and fade away.

I don't know if I'm back yet, if the oxygen has saturated my brain yet, but I know for one thing that I want to live.

Good luck wherever you are on the journey, thanks for reading this post.

Wine is the most offensive thing ever created

I for one, like my Jesus to party.

I love the fact that Jesus's first miracle was turning water into wine.  And not just wine, the best wine the people at the party have ever tasted.  And not just some wine, over 900 bottles of wine.

Literally, my favorite Biblical story, meme, story arc, whatever, ever.

But let me dig into that a little more, let me tell you why I think that this miracle had a little more to do with some deeper things than just tuxedo t-shirts.

Satan can not create.  It is a critical distinction that satan himself hates.  That is why, above all, he abhors women.  Woman initiated the fall in the garden, but from a woman Jesus himself was born.  Women create life, literally.

Satan can only do two things: Lie and distort the truth.

So Jesus comes down, he is getting ready to be all, you know, God on earth.  His mother comes to him and tells him a fact (they are running out of wine), and Jesus responds (so what).  Without regard to Jesus, Mary turns to the servants and says, "Do whatever he says".

This is astonishing.  Jesus literally confronts his own mother, and her faith is so strong she simply pushes straight through it.  This wasn't even supposed to be part of the blog post but I picked up my Bible and that part slapped me in the face.

So Jesus turns water at a party into wine, a miracle, end of story right.

He didn't turn WATER, he turned ritualistic cleansing water.  He took what we, human beings, used to ritually prepare ourselves the way the Bible tells us in the old testament, and turns it into wine.

So Jesus turns water at a PARTY into wine, a miracle, end of story right.

It's not just a party, its a wedding.  The bride and groom.  Jesus loves weddings even though he is single his whole life, why is that?  It's because when a man marries a woman, they become one, and in becoming one they get as close to God as anyone can.

God created man and he created woman, God is neither.  That means man has something from God and Woman has something from God.  When they get married the Bible states "They become one flesh".  I believe that in that oneness, a married couple who both have the holy spirit are as close to the trinity as can be understood.

So Jesus turns water at a party into WINE, a miracle, end of story right.

Do you know what wine is.

Wine is grapes, grown in a vineyard (back to this later), stored for a set amount of time (back to this later) and then consumed (back to this later).

For a vineyard to create wine, they start growing grapes.  And then for seven batches of grapes they throw them away, because the vineyard has to mature.  Once the vineyard has matured then the grapes are ready to be turned into wine.

Next, the grapes are crushed, turned into juice and then stored so that they can ferment.  This can take anywhere from six months to many, many years.  Since this was the best wine these guests have ever tasted, we are to believe that this wine had been resting for quite a long time.

Lastly, after all that hard work of preparing a vineyard, waiting for the grapes to mature, watching the juice sit for year after year, the wine is poured into a cup and drunk.  What a waste.

Satan can not create anything.  But Jesus, in his first miracle, takes something that is a creation of it's own, grapes, twists time on its head and serves fresh wine (also impossible) that is the best the wedding goers had ever tasted, and all they do is say thank you and drink it.

Jesus bends time, he bends work, he bends religious practice and he does so flippantly directly after saying "it's not my time".  He slaps Satan in the face, almost just for fun.  But Jesus himself was this very wine.

He bent space and time, he poured himself out and he wants nothing more than us to say thank you and drink from the well, filled with the best wine we have ever tasted, that never runs dry.

stop renting your life

How many habits do you own?

When you own a car you can park it in the garage, stop paying insurance on it and not use it for a while, you don't even have to keep plates on it.  It just sits there.  It literally doesn't cost you anything. Then take it out get insurance back on it, slap some plates on it and drive wherever you want.

That's what it's like to own a habit.  You probably want to use it every now and again so it doesn't get spoiled gas in it or flat tires, but you own it free and clear.

Think about a habit you rent like a payment on a car.  It cost's extra money to protect that habit because it's fragile, at any moment you might just stop doing it.  You have to make payments on it all the time or it will be taken away (payments of time and energy and money).

Most people don't own very many habits, they rent them or borrow them.

I work out, but only with my personal trainer.

I eat healthy, but only when I can buy expensive pre-made organic fresh squeezed juice.

I give money to a charity/church, but only when they reach out to me and ask and my heart feels something.

The problem with this is you don't own it and not owning things is expensive.

1) Know how little you NEED.
2) OWN everything you need.

I know I need to be in shape.  If I've got a gym membership great, but when I'm travelling and I own my health I just wake up thirty minutes early and go for a walk before everything starts.

I know I need to be spiritually recharged.  If I go to church great, but some Sundays I miss and it's ok because the rest of the week I'm still reading and praying to get spiritual replenishment.

I know I need to have a good relationship with my kids.  But instead of renting that relationship from our soccer league sometimes I just take them out to lunch and sit and talk face to face.

I lot of self help movements and motivation blogs are shortcuts for how to rent a habit or an emotion.

Buying a habit is expensive, it takes quite a huge amount of time before you own it. But once you do it's yours.  Peace is not a breathing exercise that takes five minutes (although that is a great way to rent peace immediately).  Peace takes years of having trust in the right place and living with integrity.

Think about buying a car, for most of us that is a lot of money (even if you are wealthy you just want a more expensive car).  What I find is most people want a car that cost's somewhere around six months of their total salary, almost no matter how much they earn ($500k is usually the break point).  To buy that car with cash takes a ton of work, but owning feels great.

Owning a habit of having the nicest clothes no matter how much you are currently earning or what your closet is already full of is a habit not worth owning.  In the white trash neighborhood I grew up in, when a car died and you didn't want to own it anymore you got drunk with your friends, pushed it down the road to the empty lot and lit it on fire.

I'm not sure you can do that with a bad habit but something close will suffice.

Know how little you need, then work hard at owning that.  Make a list and then realize it's expensive and you can probably only afford (again in time/energy/money) to start to aggressively buying one habit at a time.

Maybe you rent to own up front, but the best thing in the world is to just throw everything at one habit and work until you own it.

admitting vs doing

We've read before, admitting something is the first step.  While agreeing, I've bumped into many colleagues who stop after the first step.

I actually heard this sentence uttered last week:

"I don't know how that works so we won't be doing it."

That person did a great job of taking the first step, and that step was into a guillotine where the ideas head was lopped off and rolled across the floor scuffing my scuffed but not too scuffed shoes.

This week in my quest to read the whole Bible (I'm 1600 pages in with 120 pages left!) I started reading the letters in the New Testament.  I already knew that was where the meat of the Bible was at, the power punches are in Romans, Corinthians and Ephesians and on.

What I didn't realize is how much more powerful they are when contained as one idea.  Romans is a single idea, do you realize how amazing that is?  I used to find it difficult to understand  some of these really deep letters, these monsters of theology and ideals.  And oddly enough, I found them to be more digestible when consumed as one meal, the ideas in the letters actually shed light on the conundrums in the same letter.

So, going back to my little work friend who beheads ideas, let us not just internalize sections of wisdom.  Let us start to put together coherent moments, then days, the lives.  Let us stop taking single steps and start running the race in such a way as to win.

What if it's not a disorder?

We all know the helicopter parent society we live in where people are in continuous fear of something bad happening and yet more and more bad things are being discovered.  New allergies, new diseases and most of all, all kinds of new disorders.

The following quote was in an multi-article blog post about a concept called "Food Reward":

...This also implies that obesity may not be a disorder, but rather a normal response to the prevailing dietary environment in affluent nations.

BOOM!

That's the most powerful sentence I've read in a while.  The concept being that people are literally fighting against the current.  The entire word, DISORDER, is based on the concept that things are not in order.  

But what if being three hundred pounds is perfectly in order IN THIS SOCIETY.  

What if being addicted to porn is perfectly in order IN THIS SOCIETY.  

What if hating who you are and how you look is perfectly in order IN THIS SOCIETY.

A few extra side points.  What order are you building in your life that makes things normal?  What order do you build at your Job that makes things normal?  What is your spiritual order and what do you consider normal spiritual happenings?

just a bunch of order takers

We were sitting in a giant horseshoe, apparently the perfect shape for corporate meetings.  O captain my captain was standing at the front of the room and asked us this question:

"I know this is getting a little basic, and it's always good to go over the basics, but what exactly do you guys do?"

People spoke up, "We're problem solvers!", "We discover solutions!", "We give you warm fuzzy feelings", the last one was only said loudly in my mind.

The captain responded "So you guys aren't order takers right!"

Have you ever had somebody walk in the front door of your business, know exactly what they wanted, you provided the service perfectly and both sides exited the sale happy, healthy and likely to work together in the future?

I've had that a couple of times.  It was magical.

Order taking is an art form.  Have you ever had a great waiter?  That is an artisan order taker.  Have you ever worked with a skilled carpenter?  He's not a sculptor creating whatever he wants, he's an artisan order taker.

We have this fawning love affair with sales people, with problem solvers.  The truth is, a salesperson is usually abrasive because they are trying to sell something that is hard to sell or hard to buy.

Apple gets this, when they hire people for the floor in their retail locations they hire teachers, and teachers outsell everybody in that environment.  An environment where you teach me what the device can do and then take my order when I can't wait to own one.

If people are not walking into your business and ordering your product that is not a sales issue, it's an awareness issue, maybe an education issue, possibly it's that your product sucks.

Back when I was at Northwestern Mutual we had a monthly meeting among the sales people called "client builder".  It was great, we would all meet once a month and share what was working and go through our numbers to see where we were falling short.  It was the best sales meetings I've ever attended.

But it was exactly that, a sales meetings.  It was not client building.  The truth is we were selling life insurance, and life insurance is hard to sell and hard to buy.  You need to be a boss freaking sales person.

Nobody wants to buy it because they have to admit their own inevitable death, and everybody has a preconceived notion you are jerk because you sell life insurance.  And it's a complicated product to understand.  And you are paid on commissions which makes you smelly to normal people.

Now, go talk to the number one "sales" person who answers the phone at SelectQuote, the biggest online life insurance sales company, and you will find out that person is a artisan order taker.  They probably calm people down, explain that buying more is actually cheaper than buying less, explain how different terms work and guide people through the order.

But in the rest of the world of financial sales, you really do want your team building clients, not selling.  Clients don't leave, clients don't shop you, you trust your own clients and they trust you.  When the market goes down, you answer their calls.  When they have a child and need more life insurance they answer your call.

There are very few times when a true sales person is needed, not an order taker and not a client builder.  Sales people are hammers, and hammers are critical for a woodworker but only to be used when a hammer is required, every other time they just damage the product.

Hammers help wood understand that they need nails.

I remember asking the number one sales person in our office at Northwestern when he stopped calling people who were either not buying or not returning his phone calls.  I said, do you stop after five calls, after ten calls...  He said he stopped calling them when they yelled at him to stop calling them.

That guy is a hammer, and there are people all over town with hammer marks all over their face from interacting with him.  Maybe that's ok, but I promise that none of the people who were hammered will ever buy from him or probably Northwestern ever again.

If somebody walks into a bank and wants a checking account and leaves with a credit card, a home equity line and a savings account, every sales manager would say that is a win.  But what if they get home, realize they have hammer marks all over them and are afraid to ever go to the bank again or ask a question because they know they are interacting with hammers.

And they will never send over a great referral, a referral that walks in the front door ready to put an order no hammer needed.

Hammers are needed.  Hammers are important.  But would you hire a construction company that had three vans lined up outside your house full of nothing but hammers?

Final side note -

Have you ever been doing a home project and needed a hammer and couldn't find one?  Asking a really good order taker to sell to every client that walks in the front door is like hammering a nail into the wall with a pipe wrench.  It will probably work but you look like an idiot and either the wall or your hand will probably get injured.

My Job's The Worst!

I work for a monster of a company, a fortune 500 behemoth that acts in kind.  It is slow, often ugly and rarely does anything intelligent.  Turnover is far to high, what is agreed upon as achievement is completely changed every six to twelve months.  It is a classic "big box" as I like to call it.

I thoroughly enjoy succeeding at my job.  When I hit my numbers, even numbers that are changing regularly, I feel accomplished.  I show up early to try and keep things orderly, I'm not totally sure but I think I care.  And yet, more days than not, it feels as if the company is actually against my success.  That the way we operate encourages me to do less, not more.

The more success I have the more dysfunction and pain I invite into my life.

It is so easy to sit with a co-worker and rip the company apart, because it is obvious and true.

However, it does make me think of one of my favorite jokes.

Two men are walking down the street, a beggar stops them and asks for money.  One of the men hands him a dollar and they continue walking.  The other man turns to his friend and says "Why did you do that?  He is just going to spend it on boos!".  The first man responds "That's all I was going to spend it on too."

I feel like the conversations in my head go almost exactly the same.  I think about how the company is always changing direction and anytime I try to do anything they are fighting me.  That's exactly what I do in my personal life.  This quarter I'm going to write a novel, a hundred pages later I have a third of a novel and decide it's time to start juicing.  Then I mix a really stiff drink of organic apple and carrot juice with vodka and the rest is blurry history.

I sabotage myself, I have a free day and I sit around watching television wasting my time just like my company sabotages my time by making me sit on hold for two and a half hours to answer a question (true story).

I think it is easy, too easy, to blame a job for treating us the same exact way we treat ourselves.

As Bill Cosby put it, I always thought I worked my employees too hard until I found out what they did to themselves over the weekend.

jobs and prison

A job is hell, a life sentence.  Clock in, clock out, pay taxes and die.

Most people I talk to feel this way, and I think they are lying.  Let me tell you about prisoners, the system and the ghetto.

Men who go to prison often go back to prison.  They are "institutionalized" and can not or will not break free of the prison mindset and so they commit another crime knowing they will go back to prison because prison is how they operate.

This seems like insanity for most of us living outside of prison.  How could you knowingly do something that will send you back to prison when you've already been there.

To me this is simple: for most repeat offenders prison is better then not prison.

That is why when you look in the ghetto's, the ones who really suffer are the kids, because the kids have no choice, don't know anything, and can't escape to prison.  Men know, they know that living on a dirty mattress in a hotel room that cost's a thousand dollars a month and driving to and from a job that pays them just enough to get them to come back the next day is worse then prison.  There is no warm food, no camaraderie, no future in the ghetto.

Whether good or bad, prison has a future, and you know exactly what it is going to look like.

You clock in and clock out everyday.  You get exactly what you need and somebody else makes all the decisions for you.  If you stick it out long enough they move you somewhere comfortable and you can die with reasonable health coverage and not in the gutter.

In case you missed it I quit talking about prison and started talking about the middle class and jobs.

The truth is that little suburbanites are picking a different prison sentence, albeit one that is much more comfortable on your outside parts, but a prison none the less.  And they are choosing to be repeat offenders.

What's that, my car loan is up, lets go buy a luxury SUV on a seven your prison term.  What's that, I got a raise!  Lets sell our house and upgrade to the max the bank will give us (and the bank will always give you just enough so that you can always pay them forever, in banking we call that being "qualified").

So how do you get out of prison?  How do you break the cycle?

Mark has been shot three seperate times and stabbed two other times.  He went to jail at seventeen and got out when he was thirty.  At forty he has a beautiful daughter, makes 75k a year and is looking at buying a house.  He went to prison and used it, he got his education in prison.  He found Jesus in prison.  And when he got out he went through a boat load of hardship getting acclimated to a world he knew nothing about.

I'm not saying break out of prison or quit your job tomorrow.  I'm saying use it.  Less people use there jobs then prisoners use the system.  Usually the biggest fear of the middle class people I meet is that they will at some point not be allowed to stay in their prison (or in their clouded minds they want to be transferred to another prison because they heard that one is way better).

Stop the cycle, both in the ghetto's and in suburbia.  Jesus once said "It was for freedom that I set you free".

There does not have to be a point to your freedom, it is simply for freedoms sake.  So use where you are, and then work towards freedom.

the most important reader of your blog

Is you.  I am leading a group discussion in a week and I knew I had a stellar idea to work with, but for the life of me I couldn't remember the idea.  Lucky for me, I had blogged about it here, and when I went back it all came back to me.

The most important reader of your blog is you, and I bet that is even true for big time bloggers like Seth and Guy.  Your mind learns by digging out a new spot of knowledge and then it beats a path there by visiting it a few times.  That is why you remember things you teach so well.

Your blog is just a lot of spots of personal knowledge, knowledge and ideas that you own but often times those go to waste because you never beat down a path to go back to them.

I often think of blogging as teaching, letting others learn something you had to learn through another avenue.  Not until recently do I consider blogging to be teaching myself in the future.  It's free, it's easy and it's better then covering your life in sticky notes.

your advantage

Your biggest advantage is doing what is outside of your normal comfort zone at just the right time.

Seth Godin talked about a term Kanri Yakyu where baseball is played exactly to the numbers.  Seth said this was a great way of winning more games then you lose, but the teams that usually win it all in the end break the rules and push past the numbers to win the big games.

There is something here for you. Whether you are a risk taker or a rule maker there is something here specifically for you.

1) If taking risk is easy for you then following the rules is what is going to get you into the big games, give you a chance to win it all.  On an average Tuesday in the middle of summer when a baseball team has played over fifty games already and has over a hundred to go they need to follow the rules to win that game more times then they lose it.

If you do that you are giving your natural ability a chance to win later on.

I love taking risk, but usually I don't have the time/money to take those risks because I didn't let the rules dictate how I was acting on a normal Tuesday.  For me, taking risk in little ways when there is really not much return is just damaging my future ability to play in the big games.

Mark Cuban talked about great baseball players who have to hit three out of every ten times at bat year upon year upon year.  Mark then said in business you only have to hit one big home run, one giant hit and you are set up for a career.

I think Mark is only half right.

The problem is, if you are swinging at every pitch that comes at you in business and life then you will strike out and not have as many chances to swing later.  Or, you will be so tired from all that swinging that when you finally connect what should have been a home run is only a single now.

2) If you are a rule maker then you will be in great positions every now and again to break the rules and win big, but that is going to be very hard for you.  Following the rules is what got you there and you are going against your natural instinct.  What is wild is, there are literally more good opportunities for rule followers then everybody else, but more often then not they are not going to take them.

In basketball here in Denver we fired the coach of the year the year he won coach of the year.  We also fired our starting quarterback after he took a bad team to the playoffs and won a surprise game in overtime.  They seem similar but are a world apart.

George Karl was playing by the numbers because he knew he didn't have a good enough team to break the rules, and he was right.  He also knew, that if year in and year out he did this there might be a year when Kobe got injured and he would have a chance to sneak into the Western Conference finals and break some rules to get to the finals.  This year was that year, but the Nuggets ownership lost faith and instead the team is mired in mediocrity, not good enough to get in the playoffs, not bad enough to win the draft.

Following the rules gives you a false sense that it is easy to make it into the playoffs, and managers and leaders will often lose big when they think they can replicate getting into the playoffs so they fire the rule makers and bring in a risk taker who doesn't have self control.

Tim Tebow was a bad quarterback.  Every game he ever played in his life he took huge risks, and for most of his pro career those risks did not pay off.  But one Saturday afternoon, after a bad team squeaked into the playoffs because everybody else was worse, he took a chance and won a game.

Gun slingers and mavericks are really fun to watch.  Managers and leaders will often lose big when they fall in love with the show and let the show ruin the product.  You do not want an exciting team on that Tuesday in the middle of summer, you want a win.

The moral of the story here is that no matter what your personality type is, you have a huge advantage.  If you are exciting you can discipline yourself to get base hits and be in the playoffs at the end of the year so your talent can shine.

If you are a rule maker, stick to your guns but know when a real opportunity presents itself (Payton Manning becomes a free agent) you have to take it.  You have to sacrifice what got you there to win the championship.

Both ways are hard, and in world of irony, both people will believe the other persons road is easier.  It is not, so just focus on your road.

pooping on someones desk

There is a magnificent scene in the television show "The Office" where somebody poops in Michael Scott's office.  He is very upset, and refers to it as a hate crime.  Somebody enlightens him on the critical elements to reaching hate crime status, and he responds with "Well, I hated it".

This morning I walked into my office.  Went through the entire Monday morning pointlessness which exists in, what appears to be, every corporate office in these sunny United States of America.  We all talked about our numbers, rubbed the cheeks and smiled softly at the people who hit their numbers and solemnly discussed how we promised next week would be better when numbers weren't hit.

This I'm fine with.  Not fine with in the sense that it has any redeeming quality or brings value to single person.  No, fine with as in I'm fine with the sitting in traffic when their is a car accident, it's just one of the painful things in life that happens sometimes but you can't control.

No, the poop I found on the floor of my email inbox was what I was not fine with.

I hated it.

There was an email, from our compliance officer, about training for licensed employees, that was due last week and was now overdue.  This brings me stress.  I don't like continuing education to start with, and then when it is not completed on time it can cause your license's to be interrupted and that is how we get paid.

The actual header read "compliance training - OVER DUE".  That is a piece of poop.

I opened it up and there was three our four paragraphs about how late this training was, then finally in the bottom there was a list of people who needed to complete it, and I was not on that list.

Once you poop in someones office you can take the poop out, but the smell is going to hang around for a while.  The stress and negativity that was unloaded on me today was only for one reason: laziness.

The person who sent it was too lazy to sit down and edit their mass mailer to who it was relevant too.  They were too lazy to do five minutes of work that would save hundreds of people a few minutes of reading through and email and preemptively stop the poop smell from hitting their office on Monday morning.

Think twice when you are working, prospecting, selling, teaching and generally milling about in life.  Sometimes we have to deliver poop.  But if you have to deliver poop, think first, because otherwise you are committing a hate crime on somebody.

Time is not Money

Time is money, as the saying goes, and if you have money then you can control your time (that is where we have taken the thought process).

This thinking is supposedly against the culture of working 40 hours a week for a paycheck.  It is what cool kids say when they are talking about running their own business or breaking free from the man, man.  But it's garbage, and it's a little dangerous.

If you have enough money you don't have to work to pay for necessities, that is true.  So then you've earned your freedom right.  Well, unless you are sick.  Steve Jobs had all the money in the world and he couldn't control his time.  A living dog is better then a dead lion I read somewhere.  So somebody working as a slave for forty hours a week and has evenings free and weekends off is far richer than Steve in his currently dead situation.

People always hear this argument and say "well, of course, you have to be alive... but if your alive then time is money".  But my whole point here is that money can literally take your life.

Money is dangerous.

Most people get more money and become less free.  They realize how to earn money and then want to earn more of it.  They set some aside and then realize how much more they really need now that they have some.  Or they start to earn a lot of it and realize how it feels.  Then they NEED to earn more and more, not for the money but for the need, the feeling.

And lastly, most of us have started to earn a little or a lot and turn wants into needs.  Somebody may have a need for 25k a year when they are earning 35k a year, and then they get an amazing new job and are making twice as much, but their "need" is now 60k a year.

Because once you have owned two cars, that is now a need.  Once you have taken your wife out for a date and eaten sushi and looked into her eyes that becomes a need.  Once you have sent your kids to private school and seen how well their friends are behaved that has become a need.

Needs are like beliefs, most people have them but could not name them and have never taken the time to sit down and asked why.  Why do I believe that?  Why is that a need?

What are your beliefs?  What do you believe you need?

the universe and perspective

The universe is pretty big.  But that doesn't really matter at all.

Mel Brooks once said that a comedy is a man who is walking through a field.  An old well is covered up by weeds and he mistakenly steps into it.  Falling to the bottom he breaks both of his legs.  He then dies in the bottom of that well.  A tragedy on the other hand, is when I get a paper cut on my finger.

The universe, under current rough assumptions is thirteen billion light years to the edge.  A billion seconds is thirty years, to put a billion into perspective.  The moon is one light second away.  I don't know what equation I just created there, but it's so big that big is the wrong word.

But who really cares, when I got into work I got a paper cut on my finger.

You literally won't get it

Because even I won't get it, and I'm writing it.

What is poverty?  What does that word mean directly to you right now?  What is hardship in your life?  What are tough times?

When I think about all of these I believe I have had them in spades.

At one point we had two cars.  The first one got stolen, and then recovered in very bad, un-drivable shape.  The second one just stopped working, wiring some where was killing the battery.  Then somebody loaned us a crappy car, and that one broke down.  Then I was driving a work van, but it was a two seater and I didn't want to put our baby in the back cage with the tools.  Then my brother loaned us a pickup truck and we put the car seat in the middle when we had to go somewhere.  It was winter time and the weather dropped to below zero, I went out to get in the truck and the driver side door handle broke off in my hand.

We had five cars, and the only one we could drive was a pickup truck sitting three wide where everybody had to get in through the passenger side door.

Those were tough times.  I drank a lot.  We had an eight hundred square foot condo which was nicely situated in a neighborhood where cars were stolen regularly.  I would watch netflix and fall asleep on the floor because I was working a ton of hours.  I would wake up when my one year old would crawl over and slap my face.  It was her favorite game.  My wife was working even more hours than I was.

Somebody once asked during that time what was good in my life, I said "nothing is good in my life" and started crying.

Those were times of poverty, that was pure hardship.

My grandfather once told me that during the great depression they were lucky because they had chickens and could eat eggs.  Anytime anybody came over and they were hungry his mom would cook them an egg.  Bob ate eggs for three years straight.  He doesn't like eggs anymore.

He was a runner, state record holder in New York in the mile for seventeen years.  He would run along the rail road tracks and pick up coal that fell off the trains that went past so they wouldn't freeze to death at night.

His older brother died in WWII, and as soon as he was seventeen Bob signed up too.

I don't get it.  I mean I literally can't fathom times that hard.  Is a country salvageable where difficult times include a working car, enough money to buy cheap liquor and warm house?

I know there are people who have it much worse then I do, but as Bob said, they were lucky too.

Tithing and Church

Tithing and church are two totally different things.  I've often heard, and truthfully have said myself, "I don't really put all my tithe into our home church, I give to a couple of different groups and some to my church because I don't really think they are great stewards of all of my tithe."

Let's break that down.  The first thing is, it's usually a lie.  Unlike Mark Zukerburg, our giving is not a billion dollars in 2013 and is not published.  But I bet if you did publish it, almost nobody who uttered the above sentence gave an actual tithe of 10%, in total, anywhere.  Secondly, if you are spreading it around it's not a tithe, a tithe by definition is giving money to church.

However, and it's a big however, the statement itself is usually true.  Most churches are not great stewards of money.  Let's think about an average church.  Most are extremely building heavy and personal heavy.  They are usually paying fairly ineffective people and a giant unused building.  Sorry all of my church friends, this is certainly not the case for all but it tends to be more the average than it should be.

Next let's talk about what churches should be getting in tithes.  I will use round numbers to make it simple.  Let's say there are two hundred members, or one hundred households.  If they are all median incomes earners, lets say 51k per household from 2013 numbers, then the tithe would be $5k per family.  That's half a million dollars for an average church.  My church has over 1000 people and a budget of 1.5 million, or $1,500 per person.  This is right in line with the average 3% giving that goes for healthy in the United States of.

To get back on track, if small local churches had an income of 500k a year and a larger but not big church had a budget of $5,000,000, that would be great right?  I'm not so sure.  I've heard a LOT of sermons about being faithful givers, and I've heard a much smaller number of sermons about a church being wise stewards.  Those latter sermons usually come with the somber admittance that tithing is down and the church will have to right size it's staff.

The sermon I have never heard is: If you guys (the congregation) actually gave what you should give, this is what church would look like.  Imagine a sermon speaking to how much more a church SHOULD be doing.  The problem is, when tithing is up a church just expands or, at best, pays down debt.  Not to degrade paying down debt, but what should a church really be doing?

If I'm average, and I am, and I actually tithe 5k of my 50k income, that 5k is the second largest line item on my annual budget.  Housing is number one, I own two cars free and clear so that is probably a normal second but health insurance, food and tithing are all about a tie.

Think about that, Health insurance is a rip off, and then food!  Is my church as impact-full on my life as food...

Let's think about this in a different way.  In his seminal article, 1,000 true fans, Kevin Kelly discusses that any artist should be able to support themselves with a 1,000 true fans that give them 1 days wages a year, or in his calculation roughly $100 per year.  That would give a church of a 1000 true tithers the ability to house fifty artists. 50.

Five full time authors.

Five full time musicians.

Five full maintenance technicians to fix peoples homes and cars.

Five full time preachers.

Five full time children's ministry pastors.

Ten part time children's ministry helpers. 

Five full cooks to feed the needy.

Five full time financial advisors for the church and it's members.

Saving $500,000 every year.

Building with a $41,000 monthly mortgage. 

I know this is too simple.  And I know that people don't really tithe.  And I know, I know, I know.  But why haven't I heard this preached to me.  I'm almost 31, church every Sunday and a lot in between when I was younger.  That's over 1500 messages.  I haven't heard this preached.  I haven't heard this even discussed in Christian circles.

What should be expected when you pay any organization between $3000 - $9000 each and every year if you are the vast majority of Americans.

People should tithe 10% to a church and if they are generous give more money to other organizations.  Church's should be the most amazing thing in a person's life.  Both are under performing, but it seems the dialog is really only focused on one side.

I for one, if anybody is reading this, would love to preach this to any congregation.

weakness

My last post was on the concept that muscles grow when they are broken down.  We go to a point of exhaustion, put ourselves into a state of weakness and from that state new muscles are grown.  This makes sense when it comes to muscles and working out, makes sense in that it feels like a concept we are comfortable with in our minds.

Yet, when we take that concept and put it towards other areas I don't believe that the collective we is comfortable with it at all.

I was once talking to a guy about getting out of debt, we were discussing a talking head who advocates taking on a second job so you can get intense about paying off debt.  "That guy hates families." was the comment made about getting a second job.

Now think about that, my friend believed that somebody hated families because they advocated spending less time with your family for a year or two to get totally financially free.  The truth is, if you want to grow financially you are going to have to be broken down somewhere.  Whether that means taking a second job or cutting your spending down to painful levels or selling something you can't live without.  That is what it takes.  And it's not about hating families, its about sacrifice.

But when it comes to our spiritual selves, it makes me uncomfortable to say "I need to put myself in a place of spiritual weakness to get stronger."  Most of the time what we are sacrificing for spiritual growth is control.  When we give up control we feel weak.  And we feel week because we are!

When you take up the discipline of Solitude you are alone, there is nothing to control when you are totally alone.  When you take up the discipline of fasting you are hungry, probably angry if you are like me, and physically weak.  When you take up the discipline of giving you actually have less money in the here and now.  The discipline of worship means putting something ahead of yourself.  You are starting to get the point.

But I am not comfortable with uttering the words "God wants me weak".  We love to say the Biblical principle of "When I am weak he is strong" when we just screwed up in our lives and we want to justify our being a jack head.  But rarely do you hear people say "I will make myself weak so that he will be made strong".  That is really uncomfortable.  I mean it is actually hard to say those things out loud for me.  Try it, unless you are reading this in a cubicle and you'll get fired, then definitely wait for the car ride home to try it.

Weakness is always bad in our current world system.  Always.  When we meet weakness our job is to figure out how to empower somebody so they are no longer weak.  We create giant walls of protection so that our homes, cars and schools are not weak.  I giant amount of the money we spend is so that we can cover the weak links in our lives; we insure our jobs, cars, houses, health, lives, kids, pets, appliances and vacations.  Weakness, even possible weakness not yet realized, is always bad.

But I find myself spiritually following a man who never shied away from weakness.  He fasted for forty days.  He didn't build a house or business for himself but wandered around and slept on couches or outside.  He didn't own anything of consequence.  Every time he built up a strong following he would say something offensive and a majority of them would leave.  He was arrested, beaten and killed in a very public way.  Weakness was not something he was, he said to the most powerful leader he ever met face to face "The only power you have is the power given to you by my father".  Weakness was not something he was, it was something he invited in, something he did not shy away from, it was something he was, dare we say, comfortable being around.

Control and security are the foundations of our current system.  We work hard to keep them there, and we take pills to calm the anxiety we feel when we might be losing them.  Control is a fantasy for us today, but the man I follow had control over the weather, the crowds, the fish, and most importantly, total control over himself.  And he had all of this from apparent places of weakness.

This is something I struggle through, something that is hard to come to grips with.  But it is something I need to work out if I am going to keep believing the things I believe.

HIIT YOU IN THE FACE!

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is very en vogue right now.  Just work out 15 minutes a week at a super high intensity and you are all set to look like an anorexic winner of the Biggest Loser.  That being said, just go read up on Fartlek workouts (which is the funniest of all workouts because it is truly pronounced fart-lick) and you will see that this has been around for a long time.  That aside, I am a believer in high intensity training, I certainly don't do any of it myself, but I'm sure it works great for other people.

Now on to stuff that is important to me, lets talk about HIIT training in other areas of our life.  If you have read much of my stuff you know my theory of everything and my belief that everything is everything. Therefore, if HIIT works for getting in shape it then must work for other things.

Remember when I talked about Chuck's personal money accumulation strategy?  Well Charles Schwab believes that it takes four things to get super wealthy: talent, leverage, getting all your eggs in one basket, luck.  And, if you have to get rid of one, get rid of talent because the other three are a must.  So it works with money, if you have high intensity (all your eggs in one basket) interval (leverage being recovery time where your muscles grow even when you aren't working out) then at least you have a chance to get lucky.

I believe in our spiritual lives we are actually invited to live this kind of life.  For the last year I have been focused on spiritual disciplines.  We often look at spiritual discipline as the slow moving monk who is trodding through his spiritual faith, cloaked in boredom and perfection.

We are actually invited to take on spiritual disciplines in a very intense and very focused way to get returns very quickly, but usually it is too uncomfortable to take on.

Fasting sucks.  Not eating food is really hard to do.  If you are not eating because of spiritual reasons I believe there is an entirely new element added that makes it even more difficult.  Solitude sucks.  But we are not only called to solitude but Jesus went by himself into the desert.  You know what the best thing to do in the desert is?  Try not to die.  The best pastime is not dying.  And that is where we go to be alone.  Or how about giving, at one point Jesus invites a rich guy to give away everything, that is pretty intense.

So when you are physically training you are hurting your muscles.  Working out is a threat to your body and so after a workout your body tries to protect against that threat happening again by building new muscles or increasing your VO2 max etc.

When we enter spiritual training are we trying to put a hurt on our spiritual muscles or just sitting with our legs crossed humming.  Go put a hurt on your spiritual muscles and watch them actually change for the better.

How the Pyramids were built, finally answered

How were the pyramids built?  People have been wrestling with this for a long time, but the reason we can't figure it out is not because of the people who built it but because of the people who are trying to figure it out, us.

The pyramids were built by smart people who had no constraints when it came to human capital, monetary capital, time or safety.  When you put all of those aside it's fairly simple.  You move giant stones however you can, even if it takes a year, even if it kills a thousand people.

Imagine showing a professor at Cambridge in 1850 a printed version of Wikipedia.  Just for reference, if you did print Wikipedia it would be just shy of seventeen hundred bound books.  He would solve the problem by probably starting a college, getting a couple thousand students, each who was a specialist in any number of fields and asking them to start doing research and writing papers.  It would cost an arm and a leg and would take years.  We did it with just a little time, from twenty million people, effectively for free.

Maybe you have unlimited man hours, or maybe you aren't allowed to kill a thousand workers (hopefully, but as recently as the Hoover Dam, rail system and Golden Gate Bridge we did not count human lives as too much of a cost for completion).

When trying to fix a problem, make sure to ask who is fixing the problem not just what problem is being fixed.  How do you fix problems?  Now, what problem needs to be fixed?

a billion dollars and somebody else's life

What if Bill or Warren walked into your job, or your business if you are an entrepreneur, and offered you a billion dollars to quit.  I think everybody I know would take that billion.  What if they also said they were going to close the company down after you left?  I don't know many people where that would change their answer.

The CEO of almost every major corporation is hoping this will happen to them.  The owner of almost every single small company would call that day the best day of their life.

The chances of that happening if you are a small to midsize business is smaller than winning the lottery.

If you work for a large corporation (as I do) than somebody else is willing to sacrifice you and there is nothing you can do about it.

Many people are hoping it will happen to them and it almost assuredly won't.  A few people are hoping it will happen to them and you will lose your job, and at some point it almost certainly will.

Better never than late

There is the classic story in the Bible of the Israelites sending 12 spies into the promise land to scope it out and see if it is all that it was hyped up to be.

They come back and say that it is all that it hyped up to be and more.  There is one issue, there are already people living there and they are giants.  Not only giants but the grandchildren of giants!  And to boot, the giants looked at the 12 spies like they were grasshoppers.  Two of the spies say let's go kill the giants and take their land, but the other ten get the people worked up.  Everyone decides God is sending them off to their deaths so they decline the invitation and spend the next forty years in the desert as punishment.

That's the story.  But it's not the story.  The end of the story is left out.  After everybody complains and threatens, Moses talks to God, God condemns them to forty years in the desert, AND THEY DECIDE THEY WERE WRONG.  Better late then never right...  Apparently not, they tell Moses and God they are sorry and head into the promise land to fight the giants, and are unanimously killed like grasshoppers.

Pride and unbelief are spectacularly bad partners.  Their unbelief caused them not to follow Gods promise immediately, then their pride decided they might as well accept God's promise rather than 40 years of wandering.  Nope.  Deals off the table.

I've never been taught that some of God's promises have an expiration date on them,  and if consumed after that date are actually bad for you.  But that seems to be what my Bible is telling me.

Following God is a dangerous proposition, it is only when you concede that not following him is worse that you really hunker in.