Too much

Jon Wortmann writes that we are far far far too . . . everything. Our brains are simply not wired to stay engaged all all all the time. He points out that in the military when someone is on point, they rotate out every half hour, because few people can consistently focus intently for more than 40 minutes at a time without a break.

But most people in the West are living at the ragged edge, and their kids schedules are even worse! And we are constantly available to the entire world with our phones and the internet. We are so drained and focus depleted that we have nothing left. Work and the important things like love, relationships and living get the dregs that might remain. Add our constant movement from one place to another, along with the constant distraction of email, text and YouTube, then, well you get the picture, you live this life.

The problem with our global economy, political uncertainty, and reactive media is that too many of us are living at our edges. We work hard. Our kids’ schedules make us look like our schedules are calm. We play a lot. We travel constantly. We are on our phones frenetically. This means that our brains are always paying attention to something—until they can’t.

It is time to return to a more sane life, to regularly unplug and disconnect and have margin in our lives. This requires us to have a come-to-Jesus intervention in our schedules and expectations. Our mental health and our productivity demand that we do so. Let’s pace ourselves for the long haul, and a haul that produces more than frenetic movement and busyness, which by no one’s calculation is necessarily progress nor accomplishment.

You can read more of what Jon wrote here.

DTA

Those who are well read in the leadership and personal development fields are likely well versed in Greg McKeown and Essentialism - the diligent pursuit of less but better. One of the amazing ideas he espouses is PTA, Protect The Asset, and the asset is you! 

This is a wide ranging idea that covers everyone, no matter what your work, life and circumstances are like. If you have a high stress job that keeps you crippled and overextended, then PTA is the idea of making space and margin in that chaos so that you don’t burn out and and so that you can bring your best self to the work each day. If you have a high freedom job, like I do, then PTA takes a different bent.

As I was talking with a good friend/client today, it occurred to me in the middle of our conversation about PTA and the people we seek to develop, that a different acronym may serve us better - DTA - Develop The Asset, which once again is you and me. This idea came about as we were discussing that the key to successful development of others is development of yourself.

Read that sentence again. It is the crucial fulcrum of development, that I am developing me. This requires all kinds of intentionality and processes. As I wrote in my previous post about the Genuinely Wealthy, freedom to develop myself each day is real wealth. You can’t develop others if you aren’t moving forward yourself.

Genuinely wealthy

There are many many ways to calculate wealth. Most people just count the money. But honestly money does not equal wealth, at least not in my world. I have come to redefine wealth in terms of freedom. “Money pays the bills, but being able to control my own schedule and not miss out on family time is priceless.” That is true wealth in my world and in my understanding.  There are so so many ways to calculate wealth rather than with money alone.

First of all are the benefits that my current life brings me. The best perk is being able to define what I do and with whom and for how long. When I left my previous parent organization, this became one of the defining perks - that I no longer had to work with people I don’t like or care for or who are disgustingly negative with regularity. I get to work with the people that I can argue with yet not lose relationship over things, and that I enjoy. Best Benefits - the time to work out each day and develop myself each day and to invest in me each day. This alone is worth a 50% percent cut in pay, because the value is worth is 200%. Quite the payoff in my opinion.

Even though it is still 94 degrees on the balcony, I get to sit here and think and write and work on stuff that is important to ME. How do you put a price on that kind of stuff? You can’t, because it is more than a number in terms of what it means. I get to go to bed when I choose, I get to get up when I choose, I get to do what I want with whom I want each day, and that is worth more than any amount of money or financial compensation.

The genuinely wealthy don’t measure their lives in a a dollar figure. They measure their lives in advantages and benefits, and in non-monetary kinds of ways every day.

Enamel burning

There is nothing quite like the smell and taste of burning enamel, the kind of enamel that is on your teeth. In America, they numb you up so much that all you can do is vaguely get a small whiff of what is actually occurring in your mouth as they drill on your teeth. But here in Eastern Europe, four cavities filled with no novocain or pain relief of any sort, the smell and taste was keen and sharp. That was a two hour trip to hell today. I left the seat completely soaked and a puddle of stress sweat in my wake today. I had to come home and take a couple of hours to find my equilibrium again. Which included an hour long nap! Which I never do any more! That was probably my first nap in over three years, maybe longer. My neck feels like some hit me with a large hammer, and that I may never recover. I am such a wimp I know, but I totally had to come home and change every single piece of clothing today. These are the few times in my life where I miss North America.

It clings to you

Today I read, “... grief didn’t work that way. You couldn’t squash it out or get over it. You just had to get through it, but it was like a spider’s web. It clung to your skin.” So very accurate. It just clings to you and you never know how it may work itself out on a particular day. 

Yesterday was my brother’s birthday. He would have been 53 years old. I am appalled at how much that stumped me yesterday. How much that stopped me in my tracks. I had to take a long day to just grieve. So many lost moments and opportunities and moments of LIFE.  To just understand that I am alive and he is not and just be ... I am unaccustomed to giving myself so much compassion and space to just feel. It is hard to be patient with myself and let me grieve his going, and the hole that presents us in the fabric of life. 

It is not something you get over or around, just through. It clings and bites and hurts and costs and just is. Why does no one ever talk about the price that comes with grief? What it demands and what it takes? There is no calculator that can compute what price it extracts. I am not angry, just more lost than anything else. Just wish I could sleep through it all and wake up from this terrible nightmare.

When I am the first person on an early morning ride up the mountain, I catch all the webs that the spiders have spun across the road. This clings like that, nothing you can do about it but go through. 

pace and luxury

I have noticed something wonderful in the last three weeks, that my pace of work and life has coalesced into the perfect luxury. I can write! That is such a wonderful piece of life! But what I mean is that I am just busy enough that I can still write!!

Did I tell you what a great gift that is for me? It is awesome. It means that I have found the perfect rhythm, the precisely correct amount of work and tasks and activity to be my very best. The exact amount of focus and time and effort to produce the most amazing pieces. Everything has fallen in The Zone.

The best possible synergy of all things balance and life and work. The right amount of emails, video chats, calls and SMS to get done in a day. The right amount of demands and productivity to strike the perfect storm of production every day. This pace is a luxury unrivaled. Of course I am going to Ukraine next week and it will be wrecked once again. Then I am going to the States and staying with my dad and it will be a disaster once again, but this pace does actually exist. It is The Zone, that I can always strive for and toward. It will let me know when I am there, where work feels effortless and freeing and stress-free. Do you know what your right pace feels like?

This means that I say “no” pretty much to everything else that comes my way, regardless how sexy or awesome the opportunity sounds. The decisions you make about your life work and the important pieces of your life (not the urgent or loud pieces) need to be made in the cold abstract of deep thinking, not in the moment when the board is selling you on becoming their next CEO. And for clarity’s sake, I have been offered multiple CEO and other sexy positions of large power and money, and it takes me about 5 seconds to say no, because I have already decided what is important to me and life. This is not a missed opportunity, it is intentionally avoiding a horrible humongous distraction.