Tag: blogger

Be Nice or Else…

Mike Tyson might not be the guy you would naturally lean-to for deep and profound insight but he does offer up at least one amazing pearl of wisdom that may be the most profound statement of the last 15 years.

“Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.”

I’m not sure about you but this rings true loud and clear to me. Think about it would you say those mean and nasty things to a real person face to face on the street? I seriously doubt it, I know I’ve said some things on social media platforms in the past that I certainly would never say out loud. It certainly is easy to punch away at the keypad and get those aggressive unfounded and downright mean posts out in the world for everyone to see just how impressive and witty your prose is.

If I’ve said it once on here I’ve said it at least a dozen times the internet is a magical place of learning if you search it out. Sure there is a significant amount of weeds in that field of wisdom but that surely doesn’t mean we torch the field or contribute to the problem by casting a few more weed seeds to it. I’m not going to change the world with this little post but my hope is that the next time you start being a keyboard warrior set on leaving a path of destruction in your wake ask yourself this. What good is this going to do? Have I offered up some kind of factual information? or is it even worth it to post this, and how long or upset am I going to get when I start this battle?

Call to action

How good does it feel when someone gives you a genuine compliment? I love it, it brings a smile to my face and can help pull me through the day. Why can’t you be that person who finds ways to say or do something nice for somebody. It doesn’t have to be holding the door open or helping an old lady cross the street it could be just as simple as sending someone a message on social media offering up encouragement and a brief explanation on how you are enjoying what they’re doing. (This feels like I’m fishing for compliments here, I’ll take them if you have them but be sure to spread the wealth”

Any way we slice it this life is difficult and we don’t need to pile more crap on either people’s plates with our keystrokes. Lighten the load with some kind words and you’ll find that giving feels just as good as receiving.

B- effort…

I had a college professor tell me during a class that “I was the smartest student that he had ever had but the absolute worst student” I laughed at first and then thought about what he said and felt a little differently about the backhanded compliment I had just received. But like most things in the life of a young kid I was onto bigger and better things and that little nugget of wisdom went in one ear and out the other.

I hadn’t thought about that little moment in life for quite some time but hitting some golf balls this weekend at Topgolf for my brother in laws 40th birthday conjured up some old memories. You may be thinking that’s a random place to remember a story about squandering your talents but it will make a lot more sense after this. I used to play a lot of golf as a kid, like 27-36 holes a day at least 5 days a week for 4 or 5 summers. And not surprisingly you can get pretty darn good at golf when you play that much. Good enough to make the high school golf team and be a top tier member of the squad, good enough to win tournaments I was a single handicap golfer at the age of 14. I had the talent but I didn’t always have the mental focus to put it all together so when golf got moved to the swim season I decided to focus on swimming. I started on the swim team in my sophomore year I didn’t know a lot about swimming but I worked hard enough to figure it out and dropped a lot of time on my favorite event the 50 free. By my senior year, I was swimming low 22 seconds 50 freestyles and finishing 8th in the 5a regional championships for the state of Florida. A time like that wasn’t going to get me a full ride at a top caliber swim school but it was good enough for a walk-on opportunity at a D3 school. One season in me and my shoulders decided that 4 years of staring at a black stripe for a couple of hours a day had been more than enough. Besides I wasn’t doing that great in college,(see opening paragraph) and I needed a few less distractions in my life.

Back to last weekend. I hadn’t hit a golf ball in close to 2 and a half years so I wasn’t sure what to expect when it was my turn to get up there and put a few balls downrange. So I grabbed an 8 iron took aim at the 150-yard green and absolutely crushed it with a gentle fade right onto the target. I was able to recreate that shot over and over again with a variety of clubs that day. As we left an overwhelming sense that I had missed my life’s true calling rushed over me. I’m not saying that I was going to be tiger woods but I really believe I could have made a living off of playing golf. So what do I with this squandered talent now? The swing is there, the mental focus is better than ever but the time to go hit 600 balls a day and see if I could really make it is definitely nowhere to be found.

Why am I telling you this

The amount of things I’ve taken to what I have decided to call B- ability is staggering when I look back upon my life. I guess I should feel grateful that I’ve had the ability to progress that many things to an above-average performance ability and really a B- isn’t something to be that upset about. I would have loved to have a few more of those in college, my parents would have as well. It leaves me wondering if I had stuck it out and utilized those talents to the best of my ability where could I have taken them.

I’m not sure where my writing/storytelling ability lies on the grading scale yet. I’ve started and stopped on this blog at least twice now. Sometimes it seems pointless to type away at a computer screen when I perceive the limited impact I think it’s having on the world. What keeps me coming back is the hope that something I write is going to have an impact on at least one person’s life. I’m a different person today because a few people decided to write a book or start a podcast and I’m grateful for those people and the wisdom they have bestowed upon me.

Today I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts the 3of 7 project https://threeofseven.podbean.com and the guest Jeff Forester was talking about the book he had just written. He went over a quick overview of the process that got him started on the book and what steps he took to finish it. And like a backhanded compliment from a college professor there it was again, me having done a lot of the work but not showing up the rest of the way to make it happen. I had already done quite a few of the steps he suggested, I even wrote them down in a journal. Problem is that’s as far as I took it a couple of months back.

I’m not sure if the book will ever get published or let alone if it does if anybody other than a handful of people will ever purchase it but I’m assuring you this today. I feel that I have a talent for writing and I don’t want to find myself leaving another 40th birthday party wondering why I never did anything with it. So before my next birthday in the late spring-early summer of 2021, you’re going to be able to read something that may just give you the tools to make a few changes in your life.

The Search…

The problem with life is that it doesn’t come with a set of instructions on how to assemble a plan for it. You know a detailed step by step set of instructions on how to make sure what you build ends up looking the picture on the box. How great would it be to turn to the book of life and read “make sure you do step G and let it dry completely for 24 hours before moving onto step H.” How much pain and frustration could we avoid in our lives if we just had the directions to get from point a to point b in the most efficient path??? On the surface, this sounds pretty nice until you start to realize that would probably lead to the most boring, beige, milk toast, and pedestrian life you could ever imagine.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book note’s from the underground he espouses that if the world were perfect and nothing ever went wrong the first thing people would do is break something or desire for even more of a great thing just to see what would happen. Seems pretty counter-intuitive if you ask me but leaning back on past life experiences I tend to see the wisdom in his thoughts. If everything were perfect nothing spontaneous or truly miraculous would ever happen and although that predictable path may be efficient it sure would be boring.

I recently had the chance to drive route WY-22 between Jackson Wyoming and Victor Idaho. Its a mountain pass between the two towns on the southern edge of the Teton Range. Its by far the scariest road I’ve ever driven in my life and if you’ve had the privilege of driving that stretch of highway you’ll probably agree with me. With its 10% gradients, switchbacks, and sheer cliffs that but up against the edge of the roadway its a “10 and 2” drive the whole time. One minute your flooring it to get up the hill and a minute later it’s stomping on the breaks to make the 180-degree turn. The road is about 20 miles between the two towns but at an average speed somewhere in the 30’s it sure takes a long time to make that drive in comparison to traveling down a highway in pancake-flat “boring” Florida.

Once I safely got my wife, kids, and father in law over that mountain in our rented minivan my first thought was ” I want to do that again but in some kind of sports car so I can really push it” And there it is I made it through something perfectly fine and there I am wanting to throw caution and speed limits to the wind and charge up and down that mountain like there’s no tomorrow.

For my money, I’d rather my life highway be somewhere between Wy-22 and I-95 through north Florida. A good amount of ups and downs and some turns out of nowhere with plenty of miles of open road where you can get out and cruise for a while. In other words, a life that has some adventure and unexpected surprises smattered in with the day-to-day predictability of suburban life.

I’ve been absent from this writing thing for a while. I’m not really sure why it happened other then maybe the tank ran out of gas in what has been a long stretch of windy roads that has been highway 2020. Never the less on that little detour we had quite a few adventures and I’ve got some new fodder for our journey together on this adventure of life where we can make it up as we go along. If we were given directions we would have chucked them out the window a long time ago anyways.

When? how about right now.

There’s an ancient Chinese proverb that says the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago and the second best time to plant a tree is right now.

How can today be the second best time? wouldn’t 19 years 364 days ago been a much better time then today to plant that tree. If you would have done it then you would already be sitting under that tree with a cold drink, reading a book and basking in the glorious shade it’s providing.

But alas we don’t have time machines and living in the past is for the dummies. We cant change what we have done or more importantly haven’t done in our pasts, and well that’s pretty darn important if you ask me. One of the two things I learned in college and actually use on the regular are, those who fail history are doomed to repeat it. In layman’s terms, learn from your mistakes dumb-dumb and don’t repeat them.

So with that being said NOW, RIGHT NOW is the second best time to go out and do something that’s going to pay off in the future. And quite possibly right now, in the middle of this epic dumpster fire of a global pandemic that we are all struggling through may be the best time in our life time to get out the shovel and start digging.

The Problem with trees.…

Is that you put one in the ground and you go out and water it every day for a couple of weeks and almost nothing happens. It hasn’t gotten much taller, there’s no fruit and the only thing getting some shade are the ants crawling around under neath it.

Things of great significance don’t change drastically over night they change little by little everyday, in fact most days its so insignificant that it doesn’t look like anything is happening at all. I don’t know about you but that’s pretty frustrating. I bought an orange tree because I was thirsty for juice now, not 5 years from now. It’s pretty easy to lose the drive to fertilize and nurture the tree when the grocery store down the street has a gallon of OJ cold and ready to go for just a couple of dollars.

I’m sure you’re thinking by now. Why are we still talking about trees? I don’t own a shovel or have the land to plant one in and for that matter who wants to get dirty.

Good because I have nothing else clever to say about them, so here’s the moral of the story…

Planting a tiny oak sapling and looking for shade is a lot like managing our health and well being, you are barging with the future. The decisions that we make today, tomorrow and so on will impact what happens to us in the future for better or worse. We can make wise choices and thrive and grow to our fullest potential or we can ignore the call and stunt our growth in the shadows of what could have been.

Call to action.

A lot of us are finding ourselves with extra time on our hands right now. Honestly I wish this wasn’t the case. This life right now is a nasty roller coaster and I’m ready to get off, but were stuck and might as well try and make the best of it.

Whats your big oak tree that you wish you would have planted 20 years ago? Is it better health, a shorter honey-do list,that book you’ve always wanted to write or maybe it’s just a simple ole shade tree.

Once you’ve decided what that tree looks like, stop imagining what it looks like and go grab the shovel and start planting. Set up some short term and mid range goals to measure your growth, this way you can see where you’ve been and where you are going.

Trust the process and one day you will find yourself under that tree drinking a glass of fresh squeezed O.J appreciating the work that you put in and being grateful that you started the project so long ago.