Stories that define us

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I heard a quote, not from the original source, which said young people today are going to be the first generation to die with more memories of other people than memories of themselves.

Social media has become so pervasive and so consumed that people spend more time watching other people do things than doing things themselves. And now it’s getting even more extreme with AI videos becoming a large part of social media, with some videos being obviously artificial, but many more seeming real… I fear that not only are people growing up living the stories of other people, but also living invented stories simply to keep them watching. Sure I can say the same about television. I still have memories of watching Gilligan’s Island, Get Smart, Hogan’s Heroes, Looney Tunes cartoons, and yes, even The Brady Bunch. Television gave us stories long before social media. But there was always a hard ending time for tv shows, or at least until the, ‘Same bat time, same bat channel,’ the next day or next week.

The entertainment stories now are not formatted the same. They aren’t designed to hold your attention for 20 to 22 minutes out of a half hour with commercial breaks. Instead, they are like an unlimited stream of commercial breaks. Quick soundbites to grab your attention. Short bursts of information, excitement, or extravagance. All designed to keep you watching the next clip, and the next, and the next. Soon an afternoon that could have been spent creating your own memories has disappeared and memories of other people (real or invented) sharing their experiences becomes the only thing you have to remember.

What are the stories that are defining us today? How are they different than ones previously shared? Are they making our lives richer, or slowing replacing our lives? At the end of a week, how much of your life are you remembering and how many stories that you share and talk about are actually not your stories at all?

Appreciating time

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As I approach the age of 58, it’s not only clear that I’ve lived more than half my life, I’m approaching the point at which, if I’m lucky, I’ve got about 1/3 of a life left. That’s not a sad statement, it’s just the reality of the genetics I’ve been dealt.

It’s a wonderful reminder of how precious life is. It’s as wonderful reminder to pause, to appreciate tiny moments, to find a reason to smile, to laugh, and to share special moments with others.

When we find moments in our day to appreciate, the day has been worth spending. When we go through the motions of the day in order to get the day done, we’ve simply wasted the day. Are 100 wasted days worth as much as 25 meaningful ones?

And so counting the days is not as important as valuing them. We need to appreciate the time we have such that if today was going to be our last day, we can say that it was well spent. Stack a few hundred or a few thousand well spent ‘last days’ together and you’ve stacked up a life worth living, no matter how much time you’ve got left.

AI Assisted Letters of Reference

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As principal, I frequently get asked to write letters of reference or requests to fill out reference questionnaires. Something that I’ve always done is asked for a ‘brag sheet’ so that I don’t end up forgetting something about the person I’m writing the reference for. An example is that I might forget that a student was a major organizer of an event we ran, or I might have forgotten about their service they do for the community outside of school.

Recently I have been using AI to assist me, specifically Google’s Notebook LM. What I did was I took 8 old reference letters that I wrote and changed the names so that there was no reference to the actual student I wrote them for, and I inputted these into the notebook as style references. For one of them I also included a brag sheet.

Now when a student gives me a brag sheet, I write a prompt that says to write a reference letter for the scholarship I specify, giving criteria for the scholarship, sharing the brag sheet, and asking for it to be written in the exact style of the 8 examples I shared, using the information from the brag sheet.

At this point the reference letter is over 90% complete. A few changes by me and the whole process is done in about 10 minutes (this includes a name change because I don’t put the new student’s name in either). Normally, this would take me over a 1/2 hour and sometimes longer to ensure that I’m hitting all the chords relating to both the brag sheet and the scholarship requirements.

Most of my minor changes are either up or downplaying something from the brag sheet or editing to ensure the reference is in my voice, although this is often already evident based on the examples I provided. My last part of this is copying the text as plain text onto letterhead.

In all honesty, I think these new letters of reference are better than my originals. I often focused on fewer items that I knew about and didn’t give the full scope of the brag sheet. Now I just add a sentence or two about the parts I really know about the student to highlight my connection and understanding of them, and what they do at the school. I feel like my voice comes through and the AI provides more detail than I normally do. So not only is this a great time saver, I’m actually doing a better job to support my students.

Turkey-less together time

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It was a turkey-less Thanksgiving this year. No big dinner plans, just a couple small family gatherings. I didn’t really miss the turkey, or stuffing, although I admittedly have a bit of a craving for cranberry sauce. I often joke that turkey is just a delivery platform for cranberry sauce.

Joking aside, while it’s nice to have traditions, and plan big meals together, it’s the together part that’s more important than the meal. Sitting in a restaurant with my wife and two girls Sunday night was wonderful, and a slightly larger family luncheon yesterday was enjoyable too, with my in-laws and sister-in-law. Then a quiet movie night ended the weekend.

This morning my oldest heads back to Vancouver Island and we are all back at work. The long weekend is over, and regular routines start again. Turkey or no turkey, what made the long weekend special was being together.

199, and 200 Coquitlam Crunches

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We didn’t know back in January 2021 that we would still be at it 200 crunches later, but here we are! Dave Sands and I were just looking for a reason to get together during Covid. We started back at school after a Christmas break locked into our family bubble, not seeing any friends socially. The rules did allow for meeting outdoors and so we decided to walk the Coquitlam Crunch together.

We met on a Friday after work, did the crunch, had a beverage sitting 6 feet apart on the parking lot railing, then headed home in separate cars. It felt so good to actually do something with a friend, that we planned to meet the following week. And a new habit was formed.

Starting our next school year, we decided that we would commit to at least 40 crunches a year, basically one crunch for every week of school. And we’ve stuck to this ever since. In fact we are boosting our average up above 42 by the end of this year.

Early on, Friday after work proved too hard to keep up and so we switched it up and met Saturday morning. A new after crunch ritual of coffee replaced the Friday night beverage. Our Crunch walk is something Dave and I often bend over backwards to make work. Last weekends Dave was heading out of town for the weekend and so we went on Thursday after school. The start of this weekend I was out of town so we did our crunch early this holiday Monday. In fact the reason we’re boosting our average by 2 days is because this year I think we only missed one week.

We’ve crunched in sleet, snow, and rain. We’ve started it in early morning darkness, we’ve ended in early winter darkness. In fact, in almost 5 years there is only one absolutely down pouring miserable day that we got to the crunch and both of us were not up to facing the weather. Besides that one time, we’ve faced some awful weather and still decided to commit to heading up and down this hill.

Today was a weighted vest day, and we were planning on doing it twice last week but my back wasn’t up to it after having IMS that day, so we just did one. So, we combined these two challenges and we did the double with weighted vests today. We did crunch number 199 and number 200 this morning, on our first ever double counted day. We’ve done a couple doubles before, not counting them as separate, but we figure if we are doing complete doubles, they should count as two!

Yes, this is great exercise. Yes, it’s an awesome habit to keep. But the real value in doing this activity 200 times is the connection to my buddy Dave. I can’t describe how mentally and emotionally rewarding it is to have this weekly connection to a friend. Not many people get to see a best friend a guaranteed 40+ times a year in addition to other meetings, plans and connections. We both cherish this time so much that we can’t think of valid excuses to not meet up, and we will consistently make up for lost opportunities when life gets in the way of us meeting on a Saturday.

So, we’ll just keep going, week after week, and our Coquitlam Crunch adventures are to be continued… starting again next week!

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.