It’s hard to look at things sometimes. Even harder to see the good in the things we see. Beyond the polarization. Beyond the systems that are “working as designed” and chewing up people in the process. Beyond the busy and the projects and the distractions and the demands. One of my favorite musicians, known for […]
The Burden of Legacy
The more successful the old self is, the harder it is to let it go. It’s a lesson I’m in the process of learning. There’s a challenge when you are successful at something – people want you to keep doing it. Plus, it’s easy. You’ve already mastered it as much as you want to master […]
The Power of Others
My brother, my partner, a friend and I sat around the table furrowing our brows at our respective cards. My partner and I were on the verge of winning a highly competitive game of Spades. Highly competitive because my brother and my partner are highly competitive people. The friend and I served as participants in […]
Status Report – Change Planning January
Cross-posted to Medium. I’ve been writing, but it’s been a slog. The cookie-monster bathrobe came back with a vengeance, this time lined in lead. I must be onto something big — I don’t remember the resistance being this strong before. I am ridiculously grateful for my family, partner, friends, and therapist. They’ve been awesome about holding space for me […]
Empathy
In response to my Top 5 Skills for 2019 post, a mentor of mine asked, “What about Empathy?” I found myself resisting. Hard. We all have Empathy. Some of us squelch it – partially by training, partially out of self-preservation. Some of us overdo it – inappropriately taking on the emotional labor of others. Some […]
Gratitude
The US Thanksgiving holiday is my favorite holiday. It is the one holiday that is solely focused on gratitude, time with loved ones, and food. It is also one of the most stressful times of year for those who don’t have strong support networks, have amazingly dysfunctional families, or are in the throes of early […]
How to Recover from a Poor Start
Heather, my dog Cally, and I stood in the woods. We were 30 minutes into our first Orienteering event and still hadn’t found the first checkpoint. We made the faulty assumption that the trails would be well marked and that we could just follow the trail to the first checkpoint. Because of that assumption, we […]
How to Use Video Games to See Patterns
Over the past few weeks, I started playing Stardew Valley –a farming life simulator (or what I would fondly call, an errand runner – where I do the tasks I SHOULD be doing in real life). Life simulators, like Stardew Valley and the SIMS, are agreat way to see patterns that you might miss while […]
Mastery Through Chaos
This past August, I went down to Radford, Virginia with some friends to watch the Tour of Destruction. I thought the Tour of Destruction events were great examples of using creative constraints to increase mastery. In this particular event – drivers in barely-running junkers race backwards around a wall. Many of these cars have unreliable […]
Dave Grohl on Learning and Creative Constraints
Despite becoming a legend in rock, Dave Grohl continues to keep learning. Sonic Highways, for instance, was an exercise in traveling to a city, writing a song on-the-spot, recording it in a local studio, and filming the process. The first constraint was more than enough. Adding movie production on top of it? Because…Dave Grohl. In this clip, […]
