Author Archives: David Truss

A little escape

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My wife and I got away for a couple nights to Whistler. We had an event Saturday night in Pemberton, but stayed Friday night as well. Besides having the smoothest, fastest drive there and back, we also had a fabulous weekend getaway.

We checked in at 6pm and ordered room service. Then didn’t leave the hotel until we left for the party at 5:30pm Saturday night. We didn’t go into the village, we didn’t do anything other than go to breakfast at the hotel restaurant, and I had a short workout and hot tub before my wife got up Saturday morning. Lunch was junk food and protein shakes that we brought with us.

In other words, other than meals made for us, we didn’t do anything we couldn’t have done at home. In fact, my gym and hot tub are nicer than the ones at the hotel. Yet it was a fabulous little escape.

Isn’t it wonderful to step outside of the usual routine and go somewhere other than home? We enjoyed the party Saturday night, but even more so we enjoyed the getaway. Sometime a little change of scenery is all you need, no big plans, no schedules, just time away doing nothing special other than being together. We don’t need big plans all the time. Sometimes small, almost ‘nothing’ plans away from home are more than enough.

Gangsta AI in the hood

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This is next level music production and creation. The quality of this remix is unreal. I think this is one of the best remixes of a song I’ve ever heard… and I’m not even a blues fan.

Here is Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise.

And here is the AI blues version: 

I don’t know how I feel about liking AI created music so much? To me, it’s the creative endeavours of humankind that make us such unique beings in the galaxy, if not the universe.

Then I hear this and I think, we are not alone anymore. I expect AI to ‘out intelligence us’ soon enough, but I wasn’t expecting such a quick transition to ‘out artistically creating us’! Sure this is based on a song by Coolio, which is based on Pastime Paradise by Stevie Wonder…. And so it is not truly original. But we are still in the very early stages of AI musical creativity, and I fear just like we can’t trust video clips anymore without questioning if they are AI, soon we won’t be able to listen to a great new song without wondering which AI model created it?

Loving the song version but feeling like AI is getting pretty gangsta and taking over the formerly human creative hood.

Dressing up

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I’m missing Halloween at school this year. I’ll be out of town for a meeting and so it will be the first Halloween in years that I won’t be dressing up. It’s funny, I feel both disappointed and relieved about this.

Disappointed more for the opportunity to see my students letting loose with their imaginative costumes. Relieved because while I take the time to really dress up, I’m not a huge fan of it. In fact, I’m going to a fancy birthday party this weekend and I don’t even like dressing up for that.

To me, dressing up is a major effort, and when I’m not wearing clothes for comfort, when I’m putting on a costume of any kind, be it Halloween, formal wear, or even a tie, I feel like I’m putting on a persona that doesn’t belong to me.

I know some people love it. I know people seek out opportunities to ‘put on’ another outfit and it excites them. Not me. I feel fake. I’ve never enjoyed using clothing to somehow change how I’m presenting myself.

I recently found an old photo of me at my uncle and aunts wedding. I was probably 4 or 5 years old, and the moment I saw the photo I remembered hating my outfit. In the photo I look miserable, and you can’t see my bow tie because I’m pulling on it when the photo was taken. I don’t remember anything about the wedding itself other than it was in Trinidad and I had never seen large hills (growing up in Barbados) and so I was amazed by the ‘mountains’. Besides mountains, the only other childhood memory from that trip is hating to be dressed up. So even in some of my youngest memories, dressing up wasn’t something I enjoyed.

No Halloween dress up for me this year. I’m sorry I won’t be there for the kids, but a little part of me is celebrating that I don’t have to dress up.

The right team

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When you’re the leader of a high functioning team, it’s not your job to lead, it’s your job to facilitate the work being done. It’s your job to reduce the friction of the work, to remove the barriers, and to make the desired changes easier. It’s your job to listen, to inquire, and to foster the right environment.

When you’ve got the right team, leadership is less about leading and more about supporting what the team needs done. This doesn’t mean that you don’t have input or that you can’t help guide towards the team’s vision, but if the team is truly great, you’ve got to be prepared to let others take the lead where they are capable, or getting more capable. Because if you aren’t sharing the leadership, then that awesome team can quickly become less awesome. Especially if the team members don’t see their own value, hear their own voices, and share the same vision and values.

An empowered team member on a great team is far more important that a team member who just follows your lead. This is probably why the hardest job as a leader is getting the right people on your team. And when someone isn’t a great team member, that’s when your leadership is most important. That’s when and where you really need to lead.

Give it a rest

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One of my mantras as I try to age gracefully is to avoid injuries. Honestly, I’ve done a pretty good job of exercising very regularly and not overdoing it to the point of injury. That said, I’ve had a few weeks of suffering some aches and pains that are wearing me down a bit.

I’ve been seeing a physio about a muscle issue in my butt that sends a painful ache down my leg. The bizarre thing about it is that it does not bother me at all when I exercise or even when I sit, which is usually my issue. Instead, this pain only shows up when I stand still. It can hit me in just the few minutes it takes to brush my teeth, shower, or do the dishes. But I can get on a treadmill, on an incline, with a weighted vest for 20 minutes and I don’t feel it at all.

Another issue that has crept up is, according to my massage therapist, golfer’s elbow. This persist pain is annoying because once triggered my workout is done for that arm. It makes no sense to aggravate it, and so I look for other things to do.

The leg pain is an annoying ache, physio/IMS seems to be helping, and exercise doesn’t aggravate it. The golfer’s elbow is different, it’s an issue of overuse and I need to give it rest. So if I want to avoid injury, I basically need to rest my arm and do other things in the gym.

Extra rest time as part of injury prevention is very hard for me. I’ll do physio, massage, extra stretching, hot tubs, I’ll do things to make myself better, it’s the not doing things to make myself better that I struggle with.

I need to learn to give my body a good rest as part of my injury prevention plan. It’s not good enough to just do things to prevent injury, I also need to learn how to not do things for the good of my body. This is a much harder lesson for me to learn.

Little shifts for little things

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She never puts the cap back on the toothpaste.

He never puts the toilet seat down.

The kids never put their shoes in the front hall closet.

I could go on, there are so many little things that family members do that can irk us. None of them are a really big deal, but they rub us the wrong way and perhaps even anger us. We might think them as thoughtless acts. We might even think they are doing it just to bother us… the thing is, they aren’t.

My wife, Ann, has a problem shutting cupboard doors. We joke that it’s genetic, her sister does it, and one of my daughters does it too. I’ll walk into the kitchen and one or two cupboard doors will be left open. It’s not an occasional thing, it’s a very regular thing. And when I see this, do you know what I think?

Ann was here.

That’s it. Nothing else. There’s no anger, no need to correct the behaviour. No lecture.

Sometimes it gets a smile out of me. Sometimes I try to guess what she went into the cupboards for?

What it’s not is an anger point, or a reason to lecture or correct the behaviour. This might seem like a little thing, but like I mentioned, this happens all the time. Just imagine what my life would be like if I let it bother me?

So what are some little things that others do, that you let bother you? How much better would your life be if you just let it go? That little behaviour isn’t being done to bother you, so if it does bother you, who is the one that has the problem?

Polished isn’t necessarily true

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There are some very articulate people who sound coherent and convincing, but what they are saying lacks honesty and ultimately truth. Fluency and a good delivery don’t necessarily produce valid points, and don’t necessarily deliver worthwhile ideas.

Now, in the first sentence above, replace the word ‘people’ with ‘Artificial Intelligence’.

Let’s not confuse good delivery of information with accuracy.

Drinking poison

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I just read this and it kinda hit hard:

‘Never again should anyone be amazed at how Jim Jones got his followers to drink poison.’

I’m not a fan of naming killers on my blog, I think they get too much attention by name, and that glorification permits others to seek the attention. But we are living through an era where millions of people are polarized, and I’d say misguided. They blindly follow a leader whom can do no wrong in their eyes. And this is utterly and completely dividing a once powerful nation.

Worse yet, the media passively permits it. It allows blatant lies to be shared as news. I can’t decide if it’s simply complacency or if it is equally the fault of ignorance. Complacency from some for sure, from the ones that willfully spew the propaganda and rhetoric. Ignorance perhaps from others wherein there is a belief that the viewer sees the lie, and can discern truth from lies themselves… but many can not.

So the painful truth is that the poison is fed to the masses, and too many are drinking it.

The many lives we don’t live

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After an argument with a loved one doesn’t end well, you re-live the argument with alternate endings.

After an angry exchange at a traffic light, you yell a profanity while sitting alone in your car. No one heard you, but you are now two lights away and still thinking about the incident. Replaying the anger, and the things you’d like to say to the other driver’s face, as if it mattered now as much as when the exchange actually happened.

After a witty exchange with a coworker, you think up other funny quips that you could have said. Nothing you will actually say later, just things that would have been great to say in the moment.

How many lives do we live in our minds, which never transpose to reality? Re-imagined scenarios, re-lived moments, re-invented futures. None of which will ever come to pass. Never lived in the real world… yet very real in our minds.

Avoid this, try this, buy this

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I am getting sick and tired of social media ads these days. They are following a recipe designed to make you less knowledgeable, more stressed, and frankly dumber. Here are the two main formulas, or should I say ingredients, in these tasteless ads:

Either:

“Don’t eat these 3 items that are killing you.” Followed by a list that includes seed oils, or certain nuts, or another common item in your kitchen. Before plugging a product, or casually naming a name brand item while suggesting alternatives.

Or:

“Doctors hate me.” Followed by an exercise program or diet that has made the person ultra fit without ‘traditional’ medicines and practices. What,you need is our callisthenics program, Tai Chi, ‘Just 9 minutes a day’, or the Butt Blaster 3000.

It’s ‘Avoid this – it’s killing you!’ And then a product plug. Or it’s ’Transform your body, it’s easier than you think… if you buy into what I’m selling.’

And none of these are 30 seconds long. They are all longer format where they attempt to suck you in, feeling invested in the video for a minute or two before the secret to a better or healthier you is revealed.

But there is no real science behind what is claimed. Or worse yet, there are some factual aspects that are proven but irrelevant. “Did you know that ingredient XYZ in product ABC causes cancer?’ You didn’t, so you watch the video. But what isn’t shared is that the dangerous amount of that item would be 10,000 times the dose you would get from eating product ABC… and it only ever showed a link to cancer when that massive dose was fed to mice for continuous days or weeks.

These ads scare you with ‘facts’ that aren’t actually scary, or make promises that a program or product will change your life with a sample size of one person who is telling you how ‘This worked for me and it will work for you too’.

Fear and false promises are being sold on a grand scale and this formula is just showing up more and more. I guess from the amount of ads like this that I’ve seen, the formula is working.

(I’m sure everyone who tries Tia Chi looks like this at 62! 🤦‍♂️)