One Bite at a Time

I want to impact the world. I want to leave the world better than it was when I showed up. Of course, that is a pretty daunting task when you think about it. I have a hard enough time getting my kids to clean their rooms let alone change the entire world. But the fact remains that I want to impact this world in a positive way.

Changing anything is difficult. I have worked inside companies to try and improve them. I have mentored and taught to try and educate the next generation of leaders. I have even done a pretty good job at having a global impact by helping to form an industry trade association dedicated to implementing global regulations designed to protect the biodiversity of the oceans. I have readers of this blog from more than a dozen countries. I helped protect countless seafarers over the years by ensuring their ships and equipment are safe.

But maybe the scope of my goal has always been a little too big.

Pulling at Threads Part 6 – Know Yourself

There is no better way to land this plane than to tackle the topic at the root of it all: knowing yourself.

‘Easy,’ you say. ‘I know who I am and I know what I like.’

Are you sure? At no other time in our existence has there been a better way to highlight what I am talking about than right now. Do you know yourself as well as Facebook knows you? How about Amazon?

Does that feel uncomfortable? It should.

There is a complacency that we feel, particularly those of us in the United States, as we sit in the sheltered confines of the tent that we have placed around ourselves. This tent has been fabricated by our expectations, pleasures, commercialism, information, education, obligations, sensory perception, and popularity, among other things.

Pulling at Threads 4 – Know Your Beliefs

Growing up Catholic, you learn a lot of rote prayers. There is the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and if you grew up in our family, you even learned a rote prayer for the evening meal.

Memorized prayers are important, because they help make sure you cover all of the bases.

There was one rote prayer that I always liked: the Nicene Creed. Catholics say this prayer during each Mass as a profession of their unified beliefs. This is done right at the juncture of the Liturgy of the Word (the readings) and the Liturgy of the Eucharist (communion) as a profession and affirmation of the common beliefs of the congregation before entering the holy part of the Mass.

Pulling at Treads Part 3 – Know Your Limits

When I sat down to start writing a blog a few years ago, I had no idea what I would write about. I can be quite whimsical at times, so I decided to start out with a tongue-and-cheek piece about being addicted to success.

But the joke was on me.

The more I wrote, the more I realized that I actually WAS addicted to success and this was a great limitation on both my happiness and my satisfaction the life I was living.

Writing that post sent me down a Robert-Frost-eske path of reflection and self examination that helped me to expose a number of limitations that I never realized I had. Limitations that I had never really spent any time looking for because I was too busy being perfect.

Sound like anyone you know?

Pulling at Threads 2 – Know Your Fears

Ever wonder why everyone is not rich? I mean, if you listen to the radio or surf the internet for any length of time, you will come across some advertisement for a get-rich-quick scheme. Often they are people who have already become rich selling you the information about how they did it.

The people make it sound easy to make money and get rich. The only thing that is standing between you and the wealth that you ‘deserve’ is the knowledge that they posses.

That and fear, of course.

Fear that you will NOT be rich but instead will lose everything and go bankrupt. Fear that it is all just a scam and there is actually no way to “get rich quick.” Fear that you are a failure, and a one-day course in real estate development will not change that.

Pulling at Threads Part 1 – Know Your Lenses

When I was in high school, I had a black portfolio that carried all my daily schoolwork. Over the years, I adorned it with pictures, stickers, and sayings that I picked up. One quote I stuck to the binder is very appropriate for this post:

“After hearing two eye-witness accounts of a motorcycle accident, you begin to worry about history.”

Have you ever experienced that? Seeing an event with someone else and each of you saw it very differently? Maybe a conversation with a partner and you both came away with very different impressions of the outcome?

One of the most intuitive things we all realize is that the reality we experience is really just our perception of the actual “absolute reality” that occurs around us. What we see, what we hear, what we take in – and most importantly, how we process those inputs – greatly affect what we perceive and catalog as “reality.”

Pulling at Threads – An Introduction

Over the past few years that I have been maintaining this blog, I have traditionally always run a summer series. I talked about what I did over the summer, what I think are good rules for living, and last year I started a series on the pandemic, but I never got it finished. Some of my most popular and thought provoking posts have come from these series.

This summer, I find myself struggling to come back to this blog.

I am not struggling because I have nothing to say – quite the contrary. I am struggling because I have so much to say. I just am not sure how to say it because it may not be easy to hear. I am struggling to know how to write about what I feel needs to be put out into the world and how to do it in a way that my readers will actually hear what I want to say.

The Beauty of Negative Space

I just finished Walter Issacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci. One of the things that struck me most about the biography was the complexity and variability of the drawings and information found on the pages of Leonardo’s notebooks. Each page was packed full of drawings, doodles, lists, thoughts, essays, and dissections of all types.

It is tempting to look at these pages and focus on how carefully he used every available space. After all, paper was very expensive and Leonardo, for all his abilities and intellect, was never a wealthy man. But focusing on this misses a really important detail: the pages were not written linearly.

What I mean is that Leonardo always carried a notebook with him. He would often work on pages, taking down notes and observations as he saw them, and then return later to fill in the free space on each page as a new thought, or a new idea came to him as he contemplated what he had originally written down.

The Gift of 2020

If 2020 was a Christmas gift, it would definitely have to be the fuzzy pink bunny jumper from Aunt Clara. A gift that seems completely thoughtless and does not even have the decency to come with a gift receipt so we can return it. Even worse, Aunt Clara always hand makes her gifts, so you know she spent some time on it. Time that was apparently completely wasted.

The thing is, as much as no one wants to open up a pink nightmare on Christmas morning, there are dozens of retailers that sell them. So someone must see something that compels them to spend their own money to give one to someone they care about. In that spirit, I am going to take the unenviable position of trying to be that person for the year that was 2020. I am going to try and explain to you why 2020 was actually good and we should all be thankful for what it brought.

Pushing Reset

I am not a video gamer. This makes my sons happy because they never have to compete with me for the game console and they do not have to worry about me spoiling their ever-present battles for supremacy in their virtual pecking order.

But video games have a feature that I wish we could incorporate into the real world: a reset button.

No matter how awful your game is going, how lost you are in the virtual world, or how badly you are being beaten by an end-of-stage boss, on a video game, you can always just hit reset and the game starts over. Nice and tidy. Not at all like this world.

Except sometimes maybe it can be.