Anti-fragile

I am enjoying some beautiful autumn weather in the USA, and October may be my most favorite month of the entire year. It's perfect weather for motorcycle rides, for grilling out, and for clear beautiful days. Right now in this moment, I am sitting on the front porch enjoying a beautiful sunset and a great Honduran cigar. This is excellent PTA for almost everything that could be wrong or right in a person's life.

However for the most part I continue to undervalue and under appreciate the need and requirement of PTA. Even when I see, feel and experience the daily benefits of doing it, unprograming 50 years of "exhaust yourself to the maximum" and "run yourself ragged" and "busy equals valuable" bullshit, it is still hard to "feel" that taking care of myself is an important critical component of working hard and getting the mission accomplished.

But it is, ever more so as I get older and more fragile. I don't feel older and more fragile, yet the reality is that I am. Spending lots of time these days with my parentals as they struggle desperately convinces me of it, as I am less than 20 years behind them. 

So I will take these moments of thinking and peace and pleasure and care and let them do their wonderful work in my body, soul and mind in order to make the biggest, and longest, impact possible.

Difficult places to get to

After three days in Kusadasi Turkey, I have a renewed appreciation for the beauty of this part of the world. One of the very few advantages of my life and work (there are far more disadvantages most days, and you need to have compensation strategies to overcome them and mitigate them) is seeing some beautiful spots and amazing views. This of course is balanced out by the difficulties of travel and the hours spent getting to and from such places. But then again, if they were too easy to access, then everyone would go there and they would quickly lose their beauty and uniqueness.

This is a good metaphor for important work too. If you want to create or be a part of something beautiful and unique and special, then getting to that place can be plenty challenging and exhausting. More importantly is what happens once you get to the work place destination. You can't just stop once you are there, as all beautiful places in life, it is part of a larger journey. It is more a stopover than a final stopping place. As I recommended quite a few times to my clients in Kusadasi this week, you may need to look forward to four or five years down the road, and deconstruct how to arrive there, working your way backwards to the present. It is often a very helpful process to some really amazing experiences and destinations.

By the way, while I haven't posted much here recently, it is not because I haven't been writing, but I have been going deeper and polishing more, rather than popping one or two off to you my readers. So those potential blog posts are sitting in the percolator getting "cooked" some more, before they are made public, and frankly they may never reach your eyes, because they are not good enough, or provide enough clarity to whatever subject is at hand.