Personal Growth – johnny88keys

Community

One of the five Things I Value Most is Community. What do I mean by Community? For me, it means bringing people together, usually building together or working toward a shared goal.

This month I started a men’s activity group, inviting some of the men in my local neighborhood to go hiking once a month. I’m calling it the IMG – the Ithaca Men’s Group, after the street we live on. So far only a half dozen in the group, and hopefully more will join.

Why is Community important to me? I guess I’m a social creature like anyone else, but I have some unfortunate mental wiring that makes me perhaps overly sensitive about intruding on other people’s time. It’s like my consideration gene got over-amplified to an extreme. Rather than walk up to someone and start a conversation – which can feel like an invasion (even though a rational part of my brain knows it isn’t) – it feels easier to organize an event or activity that could be valuable for others and invite them to join. In this way, I get the social interaction I crave, I get to meet new people, and if dig deeper I guess I get to control the circumstance of the interaction. It feels less scary, because they’re only coming if they want – no ‘intrusion’ necessary.

I’ve done this multiple times throughout my life. With the band, organizing running relay teams, mapping out a 10k, etc.

On a base level, it’s clearly self-serving.

There is another element, thought, which is I do believe we are stronger when we are connected. I feel more grounded, secure, and confident when I can say hello to neighbors with whom I have an actual relationship. Even if it’s a small relationship, I know I can ask a favor if needed, and they know they can ask me. These small bonds create a powerful network.

So Community continues to rise to the top as one of the things I value most.

Guatemala Part 4 – Good for the Soul

I was nervous about our trip to Guatemala. As of December 2024 the U.S. State Department gives the country a Travel Advisory rating of 3: Reconsider Travel due to crime. All the guidebooks we found clearly mentioned taking safety precautions against bandits that target the popular tourist destinations. Michelle convinced me, though, that we could manage the safety concerns. Boy am I glad she persevered. I did not feel unsafe at any time. It felt like traveling in any other poorer country. Just pay attention, be smart about where you go and when you go, and use guides when recommended.

Michelle and I got a lot of concentrated quality time together, something we had been missing especially since the start of her new job, the start of the school year, and since my kids both left for college. We’ve been successfully cohabiting and even co-working: no issues and we’ve held true to our Friday night date nights. But this kind of concentrated time – navigating a new country and having an adventure together – created a special space for us to reconnect doing something we both love. Not only the hiking and mountain biking, but sampling local cuisine, learning some of the local history, negotiating with street vendors and tuk-tuk drivers, interacting with Spanish-only speakers with each of us having limited Spanish ability. There was time for deeper conversations about our families, our careers, health and fitness, retirement plans, current events. It’s not like we’ve been strangers living together, but we took full advantage of the time to be present with each other and go deeper than what’s available amidst the hustle of life.

The Things We’ve Given Up & the Chains We Choose

“Love is found in the things we’ve given up, more than in the things that we’ve kept.”

That’s a quote from a Rich Mullins song, and it’s been on my mind lately. It prompts a memory of an article I read many moons ago from David Brooks that made such an impact I paraphrased it for myself. I recently found my paraphrasing, even though I can’t locate the original article.

My paraphrasing of the David Brooks article:

There is huge pressure in our culture, and it influences how we think and what we do. We are told we need to be successful in our careers, that we need to be our own individual (“you do you!”) and that we can make ourselves happy if we focus on accomplishing the right things. Especially for young people, that we should go out and collect a bunch of experiences, and whoever collects the most wins. We tell these stories to each other hoping to win respect from others, but none of it leads to happiness – to those feelings of rich fulfillment.

Our culture is lying. What’s the truth about happiness? People on their death beds tell us happiness and fulfillment are not found through achievement but in committed, deep relationships. Family, friends, community.

The big lies our culture tells us:
1. Career success = fulfillment.
2. I can make myself happy.
3. Life is an individual journey.
4. You have to find your own truth.

No!

Happiness is found amid thick and loving relationships. In giving and receiving care. This is hard to do – it’s hard to communicate from your depths and not your shallows; it’s hard to stop ‘performing’ for other people, especially since we must ‘perform’ to earn an income.

No one teaches us how to do this.

The truth is, the people who have the best lives tie themselves down. They don’t ask, “What’s the next cool thing I can do?” They ask, “What’s my responsibility here?” They respond to some problem or get called outside of themselves by some deep love. By planting themselves in one neighborhood, or one organization, or one mission, they earn trust. They earn the freedom to make a lasting difference. It’s the chains we choose that set us free.

The Bonds Are the Magic

Setting targets is important for teams. Yes, picking attainable yet stretch goals is important. Yet we’ve all heard it’s the journey, not the attainment of the goal, that brings fulfillment. The process itself has power. Why? I think it’s because of the bonds we create with other people in the pursuit of shared goals – those bonds are the magic that connect and fulfill us.

Welcome 2023

Paraphrasing some insights from Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens:

Nietzsche said, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how.

Happiness is not the surplus of pleasant over unpleasant moments. Rather, happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile.

A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.

Over the holidays I spent time in a developing country, and my observations matched Harari’s. I witnessed life, love, gratitude, singing, laughter, support, forgiveness, and a willingness to always be helpful, despite daily physical difficulties and challenging living conditions. Also despite virtually no prospect of seeing circumstances improve in this lifetime.

I returned to my home in Colorado looking around at my American lifestyle, truly an embarrassment of riches.

That’s why my intentions for 2023 have centered on seeing my life in its entirety as meaningful and valuable. All my work colleagues – past and present; all my family – first family, extended family, my life partner and my children; all my friends and acquaintances spread across the decades. You are my tribe, whether we are currently in contact or have fallen out of touch, and I enter 2023 grateful for what we have been to one another. I am excited for what is to come, liberated from my own expectations or preferences of how it ought to be, and ready to lean into the work and the play that makes it all a life worth living.

May we all prosper in the coming weeks, months, and year. Welcome 2023!

Let It Take The Time It Takes

My daughter is the primary user of the sink in our upstairs bathroom. It became clogged with toothpaste and hair and god knows what else. Drain-O was no longer effective; the drain pipe and trap needed to be cleared.

This project fell into the Totally Annoying category. So many other things to do with my limited time. However, there was nothing for it.

The funny thing is, I actually enjoy fixing things and building things. I like working on my house and making stuff better. But when I feel my time is constrained, these projects become annoying and stressful. Why couldn’t this have become a problem last month when I wasn’t working?

Okay. Take a breath. Relax. This is the thing that is happening now. Forgot the right wrench in the garage? Walk back out to get it. Wow, it’s cold today but see the sky is brilliant blue. Need another tool to clear away the gunk inside the trap? Another walk to the garage, play with the dog for a minute, throw some snow for her to jump around crazily. One of the plastic pipes has cracked and need to get a part from the hardware store? Enjoy a walk with my daughter to the store a few blocks away, have a chat with the store clerk, feel connected to my neighborhood and community.

In the end, the project took about 2 1/2 hours. If I had rushed the project, feeling annoyed and stressed, I might have been able to complete it in 2 hours. That was the mental trap. When I let go of the other things I might have done and chose to invest my attention here, now – it made all the difference for my mental health. Slowing the pace and taking 30 extra minutes, it turned out to be a lovely day. I’m happy and proud of the work completed.

Let it take the time it takes.

Time Unattended

This line from Mary Oliver’s poem has haunted me for years:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

I used to read that and think, ‘I’ve only got one shot at this, I’d better get it right!’; ‘Am I doing it right?’ (lyric from a John Mayer song); ‘So many things to experience in this world – am I blowing my one opportunity at life?’

Focusing on time, and how I am spending it, is the trap. Worrying about the infinite things I was giving up by choosing the thing I was doing now … that’s what robbed me of enjoying the thing I was doing now.

It’s taken me almost 50 years to realize it doesn’t matter so much what I’m doing. Almost ironically, letting go of everything else – confronting my own finite-ness and accepting the reality that I will never be able to do everything – is the key. Choosing to be here now turns this moment’s experience, however exotic or mundane, into something worth paying attention to. It makes it possible to simply relax. It’s going just as it should, in the direction it should, at the pace it should.

The only way to waste our time is to let it slip by unattended.

Life is finite. We have to choose a few things, give up everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.

By the way for anyone interested, Oliver Burkeman digs deep into this topic in his book 4,000 Weeks. He’s much more eloquent than me and I recommend taking a look. He also has a series of audio recordings in Sam Harris’s Waking Up app. Book and series have both been helpful on my journey.

Never Done Before

To achieve a goal we’ve never achieved before, we must start doing things we’ve never done before.

A more empowering variation of the famous quote: The definition of ‘insanity’ is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I have a goal to complete an Ironman 70.3 triathlon in my 50’s. That’s going to require doing some new things, like giving my body plenty of time to recover after any long workout, including active recovery doing things like foam rolling. (Ouch!) Also physical therapy to strengthen my knees and loosen my hips, to avoid injury. And finally a barrage of core workouts, long boring swims in the lap pool during winter, and some dietary changes I still need to research.

Same goes for completing the Colorado Trail. It’s more solo time than I want to spend, so I’ll need to find a hiking buddy. And instead of jumping in the car when a last-minute hiking window opens up, I’ll need to plan ahead and coordinate.

I suppose there’s a choice here to just keep doing what I’ve been doing (which admittedly has been completely awesome … I am so fortunate!) and let go of those new goals. That doesn’t feel right, though. Even if those goals are never attained, the working-toward-them is rewarding all on its own.

Changing Seasons

Today I accepted a job offer. After four months of what some jealously dubbed my ‘life of leisure’, I’m headed back into the working world. I feel many mixed emotions, in part from agreeing to shoulder a new set of responsibilities. Laying down the burden of responsibility for multiple months created a special space – a space I’ve coveted – for other mental activity and rebuilding emotional resilience. I also grieve the loss of freedom now that my schedule won’t be entirely under my control. These past months I embraced the gift of time. I traveled out of state, completed home projects that required more than an hour or two, trained for and completed a triathlon, hiked a piece of the Colorado Trail, played a lot of music, did some volunteering. I’ve had more quality time with my daughter in four months than perhaps the entire previous year. When my son calls home from college I can pick up and chat with him, even if it’s the middle of a workday. I’ve been able to hike and bike in the beautiful Boulder mountains, avoiding the much more crowded weekends. Perhaps most potently, I’ve had time to simply relax, to sit, to journal, to meditate, to daydream, be bored, be alone, breathe. It’s been a period for my mind to disengage – not to stop or to take a vacation, but to soften and reconnect with the activities that are my unique blend of healthy mindfulness.

I will miss this time, but two truths are buoying my spirits.

First: I’ve observed there are seasons to our lives. As summer flows into autumn and autumn into winter, so do we flow from one chapter to the next. We live in a great river of change, and every day we’re given a choice: we can relax and float in the direction that the water flows, or we can swim hard against it. If we resist the river, we feel rankled and tired as we tread water, stuck in the same place. But if we relax and float with the river, the energy of a thousand mountain streams is with us, filling our hearts with courage and enthusiasm, even when we turn headfirst into the rapids.

Second: with seasons come cycles. I believe this is not the last time I will live a ‘life of leisure’. In fact, I negotiated and built in those expectations with my new employer – that they will get the best of me and I will help them accomplish a very big vision over the next 12-18 months, and once that mission is complete I will likely leave the company.

The world is filled with opportunity, and this particular job is not an opportunity I thought I wanted. I was (and in fact I still am) leaning heavily toward a future in which I serve clients as an independent. Call it consulting or contracting or fractional, but the work of an independent can touch many lives because it isn’t confined to a single company. And it offers the flexibility of lifestyle that I most desire. I am heading that direction.

So why take a full-time job if I want to be independent? Here is where the mystery and magic of the Universe humbles me. To be successful I’ll need a pipeline of potential clients. I don’t have that today and I’m starting from scratch. Building and maintaining pipeline requires investment and time. If I start today, it will take many month to build a client list, and during that time I need to resume an income, so I will inevitably take clients out of desperation that may not be a good fit for me.

Taking a new job, especially one that has a fixed time horizon, is an unbelievable benefit. This season of my professional life will sustain me financially, challenge me intellectually, and perhaps allow me to fill out some skill sets, all while I build a consulting network and pipeline that I can lean into in the future. This next chapter isn’t just about the job, it’s about the collection of activities across my life – within the job and outside the job.

One last thought before I close this post. As I mentioned I wasn’t looking for a job. This one landed in my lap very unexpectedly. The universe presented it, and each step of the process has been surprisingly frictionless. Everything has just flowed, from the interviews to the proposal I presented, to the salary and negotiation process. Where other opportunities in the past four months met resistance or unresponsiveness or other difficulties, this opportunity was like following a route where the lights are all green. I want to trust that. I choose to trust that. I trust that moving in this direction where life just seems to flow, where the green lights lead, is in fact the right direction. Perhaps for reasons I cannot see right now.

Inside my mind, I confess feelings of fear, uncertainty and doubt because my personal preferences don’t want to give up the freedom I’ve enjoyed for the past four months, yet I choose to trust this forward motion will continue to lead me on the path toward rapture.

Being a Winner Is…

They say that winners have mastered good habits like waking up early, reading, exercising, meditating, creating multiple revenue streams, staying disciplined, and blah blah blah. You’ve read these types of lists hundreds of times. However, the real way to be a winner is to decide what you want out of life, how your business or career can contribute towards your overall purpose and goal, and to then march forward. Some of the cliché habits above may end up being part of your keys to success, but just going through the motions doesn’t do anything if you don’t know what you’re going after. Winners know what they want and are living accordingly.

Past 7 Days

I recently re-read an old post The Rapture of Being Alive and decided to capture moments of rapture from the past week. For me, experiences of rapture are more than just feel-good moments – they are experiences that open us up, they invite vulnerability, and they make us more freely available to others.

From the past 7 days…

I felt it with Michelle yesterday, as we got deep into conversation about kids and sports and cell phones and growing up.

I felt it Thursday on the Boulder Skyline Traverse hiking with Bart Foster and 40 other amazing business leaders / outdoor adventurists.

I felt it when I texted Dad about the Chaos Walking movie.

I felt it last weekend when Joe and Jack and I were climbing in Boulder Canyon.

I felt it with Quinn at the coffee shop this week, talking about the photography on the walls.

I felt it with Luca this morning, hiking up to the Royal Arch in Boulder, discussing career and friendship and spooky tales of haunted houses.

I felt it last week at lunch with the CFO/COO of the Colorado Mountain Club. Jacob shared some inspiring mountaineering stories, interspersed with business challenges they’re tackling at CMC.

I even felt it playing fetch with the dog, and tug-of-war with a rag.

These are older than 7 days…

I feel it on every exec hike with Geoff.

I feel it every time the Zen Mustache crew takes the stage for a performance. And any time we get together to play music, even if it’s just in the garage.

I felt it riding my bike on paths through the nature preserves south of Chicago.

I felt it camping by myself in the back of the truck, listening to insects chirping and the wind in the forest.

I felt it visiting the Field of Dreams in Iowa.

I felt it laying flooring at my parent’s house, crawling around on my knees, moving appliances, and listening to country music.

Looking at the list above, trying to extract what’s in common. It’s not about the specific activity. Seems that rapture comes from two places:

It’s about who I’m with and the openness of that relationship, or:
It’s about being open to the moment at hand and immersing completely in the experience – not worried about other things – so the focus is completely present.

Those are moments of rapture, and it turns out they are everywhere.

Burnout

My son, a college sophomore who is deeply entrenched in STEM classes this semester, called last week feeling overwhelmed. He had just finished the first part of a two-part physics exam, and felt crappy because he’d left 2 out of 4 questions completely blank, and wasn’t confident on the two he did answer. The second half was coming tomorrow, and he had so much studying to do; he just wasn’t getting the concepts. But he also had calculus homework due the next day (mostly completed over the weekend, but needed to be finished off), a computer science assignment due the following day, and some drawings for his technical drawing class. That was all just in the next two days. Plus his hourly work at the events center, practicing his music for weekly lessons, and his climbing team commitments. Somehow this was only week 4 of the semester. He was asking me, rhetorically, how he would ever be able to keep up?

Here was a perfect moment to lay on the wisdom, to bring my years of life experience into focus. Surely I could craft some insightful advice that would help my son in his moment of despair.

“That’s so hard. I’m so sorry you have to deal with this.”

That was basically the gist of my message. Yep, the editors of Parenting Magazine will be calling me any day now.

My son mentioned during our conversation that he wanted to find the right work life balance. That he had seen me working so hard and being terribly unhappy (prior to me finally making a peaceful transition out of my start-up company), and he knew he didn’t want that for himself. But he did want to work hard enough to feel good about his work, and he did want to build a responsible life for himself.

At one point during the conversation I told him something along the lines, “College is a different season of life than anything else you’ll have when you’re in the work force. College isn’t about work-life balance, it’s about work-work balance.” He laughed and said, Yeah it’s not about whether or not to get it done, it’s only about when and how to squeeze it all in, and with what level of effort.

This HBR article reinforces something many of us have already instilled in our lives: making time to recharge. It’s more than unplugging, or breaking the routine. Both the body and the brain need recovery time. Not just rest, but recovery. I’ve been out of the workforce for a little over two months, and I’m just beginning to feel recovered.

Reading this article makes me think it’s not about work-life balance, it’s about engaging in work that is meaningful to ourselves, and then doing things that truly recharge. In that model, we don’t really have an opportunity to burn out.

https://hbr.org/2016/06/resilience-is-about-how-you-recharge-not-how-you-endure?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hbr&utm_source=LinkedIn&tpcc=orgsocial_edit