First day back

First day back

Today was our first day back in America. While we awoke much earlier than we wanted, the weather is mild and the kids are great and the grandkids are great and I got to see my best bud for lunch and things don't get much better than this! It is an unbelievable 61 degrees in PA on the 22nd of December. I will take it! Ribs and shrimp for lunch, homemade tacos for dinner, craft beers, lots of PTA!!

Now enjoying it all without guilt or feeling like I should be working ... now that is the tricky part. But protecting the asset (PTA) is far more important than working 24/7 and far far more productive and most importantly, builds longevity like nothing else possibly can. 

There is a difference

There is a difference

There are some lessons that I learn more slowly than other lessons. I seem to learn lessons of leadership and development very quickly and I can incorporate those principles into my life in a surprisingly short amount of time, and suddenly, they are my new habits! I honestly think this is one of the advantages of growing older and wiser is more mental agility and flexibility. I know I know that this is a razor , where there is a fine balance where this mature agility and flexibility wars on the blade edge of mental decline. But that is a topic for another day.

So while I find my mind and heart more agile and flexible than ever, my body is not following that same curve. We are moving once again (the changing address and location variety), something we have done over and over again in our 30 years of marriage. Now I workout every single day for the most part. But there is a great deal of difference between my workout, with cardio and controlled lifting of weights, and picking up furniture, heavy boxes, and carrying them up and down stairs! Just like there is a great deal of difference between my mental and emotional versatility and my physical limitations and boundaries that I have tried to cross in these last eight days.

The mental agility is awesome! I am loving it! The physical limits are painful, and depressing, are startling! I am one person with both of these realities happening within me. So the plan of action is this, set the mental agility free and let it soar, address (as possible) the limitations of physically getting older. I need a more real world workout!

The curious combination of just enough

The curious combination of just enough

There are many ways to live life, and many people stay on the extremes either planning far too little, or over-planning everything. Those who plan far too little by my estimation, make it work because they are go with the flow kinds of people, the details don't bother them or they just aren't aware or don't care about them. This requires a high capacity for ambiguity and sanguinity that I simply don't possess. Those who over-plan everything have little capacity for chance or for ambiguity. They find comfort in working out all known contingencies and all possible scenarios. 

I on the other hand am becoming a fan of just enough planning. The Wild West approach of under planning and going with the flow at every moment is too stressful for me, yet after traveling over 80,000 air miles this year, I understand that there are too many factors at play, that no one can know ahead of time, to waste my life over-planning all that I cannot possible control. 

And then there are business trips like the one I am currently on, where there simply are not enough details to make all of the decisions that even could be made . . . so you have to decide what is just enough planning to cover the bases. Stay relaxed and anticipate what you can without panicking about what you can't know or anticipate. See the big picture and identify which triggers you need to pull, even if you don't end up using them. For instance, on this trip, I could not get an answer about travel to London Luton Airport from my employer, and that was problematic because 1. It is far outside the city proper, and 2. My flight departure time dictated that I would have to reach this airport during rush hour traffic. So with just enough planning, I pulled the trigger on a purchasing a seat on a bus from Victoria station to Luton at a modest fee of 13 quid. At the end of the day, I ended up in a taxi with the boss and did not use my seat on the bus. Yes I lost the 13 sterling pounds but I saved 1000 quid of worry - just enough planning.

Of course in a perfect world, the employer would have simply communicated the details and told me that we would be sharing a taxi to the airport. However, few things in life are ideal. Not only that, had we not been in the taxi, I probably would have missed the flight, because the M25 and the M1 were both crawling at a snail pace, and only a professional driver in a nimble Mercedes could have gotten through it all in the end. Just enough planning is the conscious decision to not worry about much of what you can't control anyways, and acceptance plus responsibility for those things you probably should cross and dot.

Managing myself

Managing myself

There is probably no other area of my life where I have made the most significant changes, than in the area of managing myself. What that means sometimes is that I have to fire my wife. I had to fire her again yesterday. Taking on her drama's (she works with women, lots and lots of women! = estrogen hell), taking on her challenges, is very poor management of me. Especially when she so rarely does what I suggest! I fire every client who wastes my time in such a manner. Now don't get me wrong, I love her. I just don't want to put her or myself into a client - developer relationship. It ruins our marriage. I want her to be my wife, and I will be her husband, and we will enjoy the kids and the grandkids together. Our business lives must stay separate in order for me to manage myself well. Your mileage may vary. I know couples who are attached at the hip in work on top of everything else, and it seems functional for them. Not for me. So I mentally fire my wife as a client - that is good management of me and my limited resources.

Good management of me is the power of saying no. Perhaps you just survived (barely!) another Thanksgiving holiday, where you over-ate, and then you ate some more, followed by pies you could barely taste since you were so full it hurt already, followed by more sitting and more eating as the football afternoon wore on. Regret (and pain) is mostly what you felt that evening, and the next day. You managed yourself poorly. I had that precise experience for probably 48 of my 53 Thanksgiving holidays in my life. Well that is no longer my experience. I can and did say no. No to overeating, no to stuffing myself instead of the turkey, no to excess, no to anything that would harm me or leave me with regret or pain. I survived the whole Thanksgiving four day holiday without overeating at any meal. Managing myself never felt so good. Of course, this is not a merit badge that you win and then forevermore never have to concern yourself with these issues again, no, this is the every single day of your life variety which requires a measure of big-picture awareness, and a good dollop of common sense, sprinkled with some "do I really want to do this to myself?" questions along the way. You can also apply this to the whole shopping gig too (Black Friday/Cyber Monday), they both are just complete deceptions and fake constructs to get you to do what is bad for you, and good for the stores and markets, to eat what you don't need and to purchase what you need even less, to buy for people you don't even like! However, I was very very very thankful during thanksgiving, I just said no to excess. 

Good management of me is most definitely denying the forces of disruption, which in the modern world would be TV and the Internet. They are both designed to interrupt our lives, and not only that but to dictate what we learn, see, do, investigate, pursue, purchase, wear, reach for, want, question, doubt, find important, research, and know. I categorically want to deny any force that much power. I started strangling the power of these two about eight years ago and it was the best direction change I have made in my life in a very long time. I now willingly watch about zero hours of TV annually  (I can't control what happens in other people's homes unfortunately), and I have watched a grand total of three movies in 2015 (even while logging over 80,000 miles of flying), can you imagine how many hours of my life just those two actions give me back in a year?!?

Instead I read and read and read. I discover, I learn, and retool, I develop, I exercise to be fit, I exercise mentally to be mentally fit, I manage myself in such a way that I embrace the responsibility of becoming who I am. As Dan Rockwell said in a blog this morning, "You are the reason you life is the way it is." Yes. You. Are. Yes. I. Am.