Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
Today I was driving and I missed a light because the person in front of me was too slow to follow traffic speed. I yelled a profanity or two as I watched the yellow light turn red and the car before me finally crossed the line into the intersection. 6-7 minutes later, and one light from my turn-off the car in front of me was driving the speed of molasses on a cold day, and while cars in the left lane sped through the light, I was left yelling profanities yet again, while me and the slow poke in front of me slowed and stopped in our lane… while the light hadn’t quite switched to red from yellow yet.
It took this second over-the-top-loud-yelling-in-a-car-just-to-myself swearing of profanities to make me realize that I wasn’t that upset at the other drivers. No, I have been suffering back pain for two solid weeks and this is what was really getting to me.
It wasn’t bad driving, it was a bad back. Neither traffic event warranted my overreaction. Both were minor inconveniences rather than major affronts to common sense or to me personally.
It makes me wonder:
How often do we discount how much our mood can affect our reaction to events?
In this case I made a proverbial mountain out of a couple mole hills. And recognizing where the blame lay allowed me to rebalance myself so that I didn’t continue doing this for the rest of the day.
I was taking my weekly walk with a buddy last weekend and I told him a story about the first time I watched a show we both enjoyed in our youth. He then told me that this was the third time I’ve told him that story, but he knew I enjoyed sharing it so he liked hearing it.
I’m visiting my parents and I’ve heard a few old stories from them and my sisters, and I’m sure they’ve heard a few repeats from me. It’s interesting the way our old stories define us.
Do we remember fond moments or frustrations? Do we reminisce about family gatherings or family disagreements? Is it acts of kindness or malice that we weave our stories around? Are these stories of joy, laughter, sadness, or scorn?
What do we hold on to? What shapes the memories that matter, and ultimately shapes us? If these memories don’t serve us well, can we change them? Can we redefine these memories? Can we give them less or more power over us?
I believe we can. And if we happen to hear our family or friends share happy stories more than once, hopefully we can have the same grace my buddy had to listen and enjoy (again).
Whenever I see people get on diets or start jumping into crazy workout schedules I think about how long they will last? Is this a lifestyle change or a temporary change? And often the ones that are temporary are focused on unrealistic targets that they are very unlikely to get to.
Good habits, optimizing small patterns of behaviour, and living a good life without ridiculous sacrifices or hours upon hours of relentless dedication. Not 3 hour a day workouts, but at least 45 minutes five days a week. Not broccoli and chicken every day, but being thoughtful about junk food and making smart choices.
Not unachievable targets, but realistic goals over long periods of time where you’ve maintained good habits for eating, sleeping, and working out. Fit for life, not looking fit for my holiday bathing suit. Healthy living, not perfect diets and workouts. Because when the bar is set too high, when you believe the fitness magazines that tell you how to get a 6-pack in 6 weeks, you are not seeing thé tremendous sacrifices those abs require. We need to set a realistic destination, then enjoy the journey.
Maximize your profits, grow your busy, success is just around the corner, and when you get around that corner greater success is just around the next corner. There is always more to get, more to gain, more to achieve.
But at what cost?
What is your time worth? What happens when you grow too big to feel like a community? Where does the next dollar come from: cheaper parts, lower cost labour, a drop in quality at greater than maximum production?
And again, what about your time? How many hours do you put in? How many hours when you are not working is your brain still focused on your ‘to do’ list, or on your work in general?
Getting bigger isn’t always getting better. Sometimes it’s smarter to optimize than to grow. Sometimes your current customers are more import than your next customers. Sometimes your time with family and friends should be the most important thing you focus on.
But these two things are not mutually exclusive. Optimization can help build your business, profits, and even a positive working environment… and improve your time management. A model of optimization helps you achieve more with less, and allows you to improve in more areas besides a focus only on getting bigger.
Someone asks you about your day, and the first thing that goes through your mind is the thing that bothered you most.
“How was your meal?” It was really good, but…
An inconsiderate driver doesn’t let you merge and you are agitated for the next 20 minutes.
It takes practice letting go of negative thoughts. We hold on to unhelpful experiences unnecessarily. We almost cherish them. ‘Look at me. Look at how I’ve had to struggle. See what I have to put up with. Recognize my hardship.’
The real hardship is self-inflicted.
It’s not what happened to you, it’s what you hold onto. It’s also what you let go of.
What was the best part of your day? What was your favourite part of the meal? Boy, I’m glad I’m not that guy that didn’t let me merge, poor guy probably isn’t living his best life… I’m grateful that most people I deal with aren’t like him.
When you are used to holding on to the hard parts of life it takes a bit of mental gymnastics to transform your way of thinking to a more positive outlook. Accept a compliment, don’t downplay it. Find someone to thank. Choose to let go of the frustrating part of the day that you want to bring up and relive, and instead remember a shared laugh, a kindness, a success.
It’s not what happened to you, it’s what you hold onto. It’s also what you let go of.
One of my favourite sayings, almost a mantra for me, is:
The meaning of your communication is the response that you get.
This message has two important parts:
1. It puts the responsibility of good communication on me as a communicator.
2. It focuses on the result of my communication.
If someone doesn’t understand my message (2 – result), then I didn’t communicate the message well enough (1 – responsibility).
It reminds me to be clear and concise. It reminds me to check for understanding. It reminds me to bite my tongue, and listen so that I understand the perspective of the other person. And it harshly reminds me that I’m imperfect at doing these things when I’m not understood and when I don’t take ownership of the miscommunication.
This is most important when dealing with difficult conversations.
I’m reminded of this coaching advice about verbal jujitsu:
It’s easy to blame someone else for poor communication, much harder to accept that we can control the narrative when we recognize that we are accountable and responsible for our good communication… And that in the end it’s the result matters. Not winning a point. Not blaming someone else for misunderstanding. Not getting the last word in.
This is the world we now live in. Almost everything we do is public by default, private by choice. But even then we can’t guarantee our privacy. Share something, anything online privately and it’s only as private as the least privacy-minded person.
Send a photo to just your closest friends, but one friend finds it funny and passes it on.
Send an email to a few people to try to resolve a private problem, but one recipient decides to forward it beyond the group… or worse yet, shares it on a public forum because they disagree with how you are dealing with the situation privately.
Send a direct message to someone rather than having it in your public timeline, and they respond by sharing your message on their public timeline, along with their response.
Privacy is hard to do in a world where so much is easily made public. It’s hard to do when the default is public. This speaks to how important it is to act as if anything you share is public. Because while we might make the choice to be private, we are only one part of the sharing equation. Private by choice means keeping something just to yourself, and not saying/sharing it with anyone or on any social media platform.
All communication is public by default. Privacy is an illusion that can be broken at any time.
Just a simple reminder that we don’t live in a dichotomy. The world isn’t either black or white. Most ideas sit somewhere in between.
Nuances in politics, in culture, and in our communities create opportunities to learn, to explore, and to be empathetic. Not sympathetic, empathetic. I remember interviewing a friend of my aunt’s for an essay about discrimination. He was in a wheelchair and I quoted him in my paper, “The only place sympathy belongs is between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”
We don’t learn if our ideas aren’t challenged. We don’t learn by talking but by listening. We can disagree. We can even argue and debate. We can research and support our ideas. We can walk away… and maybe we can change our minds. Maybe we can find the grey that allows us to coexist without feeling like we have to change others minds.
Ever find yourself feeling hesitant to say things are going well… or even worse, ‘Going smoothly’? You don’t want to jinx it, to turn your luck around. So things at work and home are going good, even great, but when someone asks you how thing are going you just say ‘fine’, or respond ‘ok’.
You might share that things are good, but preface it with something challenging. Or worse yet you might add that you are busy:
“How are things going?”
“Busy, but good.”
Like Dean Shareski says, Everybody’s busy. Busy is not a badge of honour. So, why mention it? Why preface your well-being with a statement about being busy or any other statement for that matter:
“How are things going?”
“Great, but have you seen the price of eggs?”
“Great, except for my favourite hockey team lost again.”
“Fantastic, if only I had one more hour of sleep.
It’s not bragging to say things are good, when someone asks. Be good. Be great. Allow things to be wonderful. It’s not going to last forever, so why make it unnecessarily conditional? Enjoy the fact that sometimes things are going well without adding stipulations and parameters.
Six years ago in Philadelphia I ran a session at Educon on Failure. Bill Ferriter came to the session and after the interactive presentation he created this image:
This was the premise I was working from,
When is failure really a success?When we engage students in EPIC projects and challenges,the journey to success is often fraught with failuresthat can prove to be amazing learning opportunities.
Do we need to reexamine the use of the term ‘Failure’?
Our present education system is built around always finding the ‘right’ answer, but when can the wrong answer be valuable? How can we provide rich, meaningful opportunities for students to make mistakes, iterate, persevere and develop alternative approaches to problems relevant to what they are learning?
4 years before this presentation I created this image:
Think of this: If students (regardless of skills and abilities) have only ever met success, and accomplished every task, assignment and project they have needed to do for school, then they weren’t pushed hard enough. In this case, it is the program that is the failure, because the students were not challenged as much as they should have been.
The learning potential of failure is significant. If the work is meaningful enough, there can be more learned from an epic failure, than a marginal success, where the measure for success was set too low.
We talk a lot about ‘learning through failure’ in education, but we don’t really mean failure. Because when a student takes lessons from something not working, then it’s a learning opportunity and not actually a failure.
When you think about it, lack of knowledge is where the learning begins. If you give students the knowledge, they don’t really learn, you actually rob students of their learning. You want them to struggle and to find the learning challenging. And if the challenge is authentic, if it’s really a challenge, then it’s not something they’ll get on the first try. So hitting the ‘failure point’ is part of learning. Trying to achieve too much needs to be part of the process… and so bumping into failure is an essential part of learning.
So a failure is only a failure if the challenge lacks reflection, resources, support, or effort. If these things are provided (by the teacher and more-so by the learner) then the learner didn’t actually fail. They may not achieve their original goal, but they invited learning into the attempt… and learning is achieved. That is not a failure.
The idea of learning through failure is actually not a failure at all. It is accepting that there are opportunities for learning in not achieving the intended goal but still identifying that there was learning to be acquired and often the struggle is something that makes this kind of learning stick.
