David is looking to get his groove back . . .

Overwhelmed and overclocked is what life in the modern world feels like, all the time. Today is the first day in . . . forever it feels like . . . where I have had the margin to do the mundane and necessary. Like changing a blown light bulb, repairing the license plate holder on the car, and the not so mundane, like taking my wife out to breakfast, and writing a blog post. For a guy who takes margin and space in life very very seriously, this is like blasphemy.

So I decided to turn the day upside down in order to try and regain my leverage on me. As my good friend Jeff said, "I think I know what you mean about clarity, priorities and leadership "being in your head". Self-leadership is almost certainly the most important variety of influence! The way I think through and operate on my priorities, how I self-motivate, self-regulate, and self-assess are pretty critical functions in a world where no one is looking out for you, no one is planning your career, and no one owes you anything, regardless of what the politicians say. The day each of us creates is a function of that self-leadership."

Notice that last phrase, the day each of us creates is a function of self-leadership. Ouch. Even a leadership focused/oriented/driven guy like me, can let the urgency of the immediate and loud, drown out the discipline of purpose and the important. Granted life is a constant flux of cycling demands, but Jeff has it right, the day I create is a function of self-leadership, and I can't lay that at anyone's feet but my own.

Birthday travels - or trains planes and rental cars

I am fairly well traveled, but I still make lots of mistakes while traveling. Yesterday I even made a dry run for the Gatwick Express to make certain I knew how and how long to take the correct steps to get to my flight to Madrid from the center of London. However in my enthusiasm to cross my T's and dot my I's, I purchased a one way ticket yesterday to Victoria station to speed me on my way this early morning. That. Won't. Work. You can't do that on the London tube because the date is printed right on the ticket and the British transportation authority simply won't let you.

Luckily for me, there are actual humans working on the tube who will listen to a sad foreigner tale and allow one to pass even without the correct ticket. I encountered three such individuals on my way to Gatwick this morning, and all three of them endeared the UK to my heart. They were so helpful and ever so polite. Dear God in heaven, may Spain be the same! I have never been to Spain, and I don't speak Spanish (the only class in undergrad I ever failed - due to excessive absences), and I have a rental car to fetch, 200 kilometers to navigate, a hotel to find, and refugee project to observe, affiliates to test, and a birthday to celebrate. We all need helpful peeps along our path to assist us in our arrival, no matter how much we have traveled.

The negators and the instructors

The negators and the instructors

There are always those people who are negative or who are going to be negative about what you are doing, or how you are doing it, or where or why you are doing it, or that you aren't doing the right thing nor the right way. It is simply the law of averages or the law of human behavior or both. You simply cannot avoid critiques. And unique to spiritual ministry (and politics I believe) is the phenomenon that the majority of people in the world think that they know how to do your job at least as good as you, and that they have the right, perhaps the obligation, to tell you how to do that job of yours that they have never done themselves.

I heard it 1000 times as a pastor, 1000 times as a missionary, and I hear it now that I am in the consulting (with a church ministry focus) business. It is simply the most frustrating and flabbergasting thing ever. I heard it on the way to the airport this morning, as my driver informed me of all the things wrong with his church, all the changes that must be made, his list of criticisms of the pastor, all from a guy who has never pastored a church for a single minute of his 55 years of living. I hear it in every single conversation about politics and "how it ought to be" or "how it would be different if I were in charge" perspectives.

There was something my dad taught me, and that I have tried to pass on to my children, in that every job in the world is much more difficult than it appears at face value, and that the more effortless it appears, the greater the master who is accomplishing it. That aside though, does not explain why these two fields in particular are consistent targets for criticism and advice. Perhaps it is as simple as the shallowness of the understanding of the negator or instructor? Maybe. I mean how hard can it be to pastor a congregation and lead a church? My grandfather always said that I only had to work one a day a week. No matter how often I pointed out to my grandfather that a pastor must excel at theology, public speaking, counseling, business, leadership, problem solving, organizational development, people development and often music as well. That is nine different fields of excellence! Even worse yet, your skills are at least equally impacted by your charisma, character and morals.

How many times someone has instructed me about how to reach more people on the mission field, even though they themselves have never learned another language, they have never learned another culture, they have never lived (much less thrived!) away from their families, traveled internationally, nor have ever worked in the church as staff! These mono-linguistic, mono-cultural, un-traveled never left their zip code negators or instructors are telling me, a professional who has 35 years of education and 30 years of experience in this work, how to better accomplish my responsibilities! The arrogance and ignorance is consistently one of the most ridiculous and insane regular occurrences in my life work. 

However the conundrum is this, these negators and instructors hold one key part of this work, one tiny sliver that gives them the right, to give me input, instruction, negatives, demoralizing derogatives, and criticism in their minds . . . they enable the work with their financial resources. This is a transactional event for them. Whereas in most industries and fields, workers exchange their time for money, which involves instruction and direction from the employer, ministry workers are servants of the public, and servants of God. In other words, we exchange our LIVES for the honor of being the one's who serve, the one's who are diminished, the one's who everyone else thinks they should be accountable to ... well everyone. 

The learner in me wants to honor the one voicing a concern, to listen carefully and see if I have missed something important or overlooked a critical element of the work, to be approachable and understanding. No one knows everything, even if they have my education and experience. But there are positive ways to accomplish this, it does not have to be negative nor instructive. But arrogance and ignorance are not the path to growth on either side of the equation. 

We have to live with the fact of negators and instructors exist, who have little if any idea whatsoever, about what they are negating or instructing, but we don't have to let it be important. If you have a calling, if you have a passion, then go do it better than anyone else. Build, create, innovate and disrupt the world for the sake of what is inside you and your heart. Negators and instructors be damned.

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.

I get to!

It has been great reading all the Thanksgiving RSS feeds coming into my Reeder these last few days. Just listening to all the ways different people experience thankfulness and gratefulness is very rich, no matter what walk of life they come from or live in. Three really stood out to me. I really liked what Laura Vanderkam said she learned by keeping a journal of thankfulness and gratitude for a month, leading up to Thanksgiving. The best take away for her was that it was creative and forward thinking, "I’d remember that I was committed to finding three wonderful things to write down that night. Rather than sift through the crappy things that happened earlier in the day for something vaguely positive, I’d try to engineer something cool in the remaining hours before I went to bed." She really made me stop and think with that observation/action. It was a slight epiphany that I can MAKE something good out of this day, even if it has been totally in the crapper otherwise.

The second was an excerpt from Oliver Sacks' book, published posthumously, "Gratitude" and what he wrote about dying is rich: "I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure." It makes you want to cry with the depth of what he wrote, but most of all it makes you want to LIVE!

Finally, the one that has been occupying my mind the very most today is what James Clear posts each Thanksgiving Holiday that one of his coaches taught him in college, about how to be a thankful person. Change just one word in your life says Clear, you "get" to. Not "have" to, but "get" to. And folks, that changes everything. I get to get up early and work out, I get to work, I get to provide, I get to create value, I get to change the world, I get to stay faithful and true to my bride, I get to serve God, I get to live the truth, I get to work hard and make a living, I get to work in some of the craziest places on earth, I get to meet some of the most lost people on the planet, I get to see some of the grimiest places known to man, I get to experience jet lag more than anyone I know, I get to love this one wild beautiful life that I have been given. I am thankful.

Last day of warmth until May probably

Last day of warmth until May probably.

It's been a great three weeks in Asia, so productive, so restorative, complete detox! Today is the last warm day until Spring for me most likely. Kimmy told me it was 27 and very frosty there in York PA this morning :-(. Don't get me wrong, I try (and mostly succeed) to maximize Winter to its best as well, but cold weather begs for different things than warm weather does. Warm weather begs me to sweat, and the more I sweat, the more water I drink and the less beer I want and the lighter I eat, etc etc, it is such a natural detox place to be. I have often said that I feel 10 years younger in Asia, and for someone who regularly acts like a 12 year old, that is saying something! Truthfully, I feel as good here, as I did in college, and that was a lot more than 10 years ago. 

Cold weather can be a rush, as you fly down the slopes on skies or a snowboard, or sit in a pub with friends drinking some local wizardly created beverage. But I don't sweat, I don't get outside nearly enough, I don't have blazing moments of creativity or inspiration.

Today I am sitting here on the rooftop in shorts and a tee. Tomorrow before the day is over I will need wool socks and a jacket at the very least. I clearly need some new strategies for making the most of the wintertime and not making any excuses for the slow down of my brains and my success. What about you?

Post crash thoughts

Post crash thoughts

I have had a number of amazing things happen to me over the course of my life, but perhaps none as wild as walking away from getting hit by a car while on my bicycle 48 hours ago. It goes without saying that life is a fragile thing, and can change in the blink of an eye, through no fault of our own. Although in this case I do bear all the responsibility of making sure there is nothing zooming through the intersections regardless if I have a green light or not. Needless to say, I have been much more vigilant in watching the traffic!

I recently had a close friend bemoaning the need for diligence and vigilance, but he got little sympathy from me, and would receive even less now. If we are to have any choice in our destinies and any say about what lives we lead, then diligence and vigilance and faithfully choosing the most important actions that produce the results we want, rests squarely on our own shoulders. Leading lives that are at the capricious whims of others is the very last thing a thinking man wants. While my friend may be correct in that this can be exhausting, the other options are unthinkable. No thank you.

All the life any of us have is this moment, there are no yesterdays and there are no tomorrows yet. Have a care, make this moment count, do what matters now.

Hit by a car

Hit by a car

Hurts like hell. Just so you know, I am a very careful person, even though I do dangerous things. I manage risk like no one you have ever met in your life, but I made a classic mistake today and am fortunate to have lived through it. The mistake I made was thinking like a westerner when in Asia.

Westerners look at the lights in an intersection. Asians look at the traffic. Usually when I am at the top of my game, I do both. However today, at the very last intersection in my 53 mile ride, less than a block from my rooms, the light turned green, and maybe my mind was mush by this point or something like that, but I just started pedaling through the intersection because the light turned green. I did not look at the traffic obviously because . . . 

Late model gray Nissan, barreling through his red light, smashed into me broadside and sent me flying. Now in Asia we always say WHEN you are in an accident, not IF you are in an accident. And it finally happened to me. Did I tell you it hurts like hell?

However, any accident you walk away from is good in my book. Nothing broken, although I have road rash and a huge raspberry on my hip, sore as bear, and I am sure the aches will be especially loud tomorrow, but I am alive and that makes it an early Thanksgiving! Lesson of the day? When in a different culture, take extra care to pay attention to the details, they really matter. After 21 years of living abroad I should know this better than most.

Robbing people

Robbing people

"DON’T ROB PEOPLE OF THEIR PROBLEMS I am not saying we should never help people. We should serve, and love, and make a difference in the lives of others, of course. But when people make their problem our problem, we aren’t helping them; we’re enabling them. Once we take their problem for them, all we’re doing is taking away their ability to solve it" - "Essentialism" by Gregg McKeown

I am consistently astonished by how many people want my input primarily as a problem solver, an obstacle remover, a resource of taking their problem and carrying some (or all) of that weight for them, the solution, the short cut, and the one who will become co-responsible for the problem. Stop. Right. Now.

It was a pivotal and epic moment in the life of the Aderholdt family, Fall of 2008. I gathered everyone around, my wife and my three young adult children, and I told them that I was through, I was finished, I was no longer the solution to the challenges that they faced in their lives. I still loved them, perhaps more than ever, but no longer was I the answer to anything.

Within a few years I expanded that audience to all my working relationships. The freedom is profound. The results for them empowering beyond what I could have ever imagined. The emotional balance is astounding. Try it. Your need to be needed is crippling you, and those you love and work with each day.

To Mark and me

I was reading a novel on my flight to Asia this past weekend, and while it was not a leadership book or a business book or even an important book, (I was just chillaxing) there was a powerful line or two in there. "Most people aren't really living. They are just planning, remembering, or regretting." 

I thought that to be powerfully accurate. While there may be more than the three listed options of what people are really doing, I find far too many of my associates, neighbors and acquaintances, not really living. Too I find myself horribly guilty of those three tasks far more than I am guilty of living.

Living means being here now, living in this moment. Not in the future because that is planning. Not in the past because that is remembering. And not in the negative because that is regretting. Well there is certainly a place in life for all three of those things in different measures, but I rob the present of all that it is and could be, when I focus excessively or obsessively on any one of those three (or others).  

So I am practicing being all here right now for the majority of each and every day. And I am flabbergasted at how difficult it is proving to be.  I have always labored under a "destination disease" cloud. As a young boy even, I remember how I would escape from the present by dreaming of all the different places, worlds, cultures I read about in books, endless books, I think I read for 15 hours a day some days. Then as a teen trying to plan, dream, scam my way out of that small town I grew up in and the life that my parents had built for themselves. Then in college where the dream was cast over and over to go and win the heathen at any cost (or some variation on that theme) and I drank the koolaide all the way to the bottom of the glass. Then in ministry, grad school, ministry again, all the time resolutely looking toward "the field" never realizing (or perhaps just not acknowledging) that some really wonderful things were happening along the way. I missed the impact and significance of about 80% of each of those days, because I was always planning something greater, reaching for more, in such a way that I lost all of those immediate, those present moments, those irretrievable nows, that will never be quite the same again. And I could go on indefinitely with this confession, as it reaches far deeper into my existence than this short paragraph can communicate or bear.

Long story short, I am still practicing this one diligently. And while I still have far far to go to call myself a success at this, I can honestly say I have done more living in the past three years, than I did in all the previous 50 years combined. I am not proud of that, but it is a great deal of progress for me. Three years ago this month a dear friend killed himself. He is no longer living on this plane of existence, but neither was I. Now I am determined to change that every single day. Here's to you Mark.

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. 

Putting off distractions

This is the primary lever that I have successfully used to stick to my morning routines for years now. This actually begins the night before to be perfectly honest in the fact that I turn my phone to airplane mode when I lay down to go to sleep. This delays all texts, delays all social media notifications, delays all emails, delays everything! So that the all important thing called sleep can happen unimpeded and uninterrupted.

Yet for over a decade I would check email first thing in the morning, and that mental productivity and problem solving and challenges of the day, would funnel my energy into a tornado of work work work. But starting my day with work is very very counterproductive. I know that sounds really wrong, but it is not. I have measured my outputs throughout the day, and I can consistently get more done each and every day, by not starting the day with work.

Instead I start the day with development. I need to develop my primary asset which is me myself and I. So I develop my flexibility in a mental way first. I play a couple of puzzle games in order to get my brain up and moving in the mornings. When I successfully conquer those, I develop my physical flexibility. This gets ever more important as I get ever more older! 15 minutes of stretches, twists, reaches, crunches, curlings, stretches, twists, bends, and stretches. There is a pattern here.

Then a couple of hours of working out on the bicycle, weights, pull ups and dips and curls, all the while listening to audible books on the earbuds, makes for an energizing and high accomplished morning.

Now it is time for the best meal of the day, spicy noodles is my preferred breakfast, but I can only get that when in Asia. When at home in Europe, I often have two eggs soft fried, with hot spicy peppers all over them. And of course my daily pot of coffee!

One would think that it is time for email now, but no, because email is a lower productivity activity than reading a couple of hours of leadership material, blogs, leadership tools, and research. This requires my very best energy and speed and insight and thinking, so it gets premium time in my work day. Only after I have completed all these other highest priority tasks and events each day, do we get to email . . . which as we all know, can suck the rest of the day away like hurricane.

But this consistent putting off of all distractions until the most important things are finished, produces an amazing result over time, that allows me to make my best impact on the world. This is what makes life significant and meaningful. I live it intentionally, rather than allowing the urgent to drive the immediate, which in the long run are just distractions.

Holidays?

Macedonia has the most holidays of any country in the world it feels like, honestly there is one every week I think. And for me, as an ex-pat here, these constant holidays just disrupt my schedules and plans and life for the most part, because I don't work on the Macedonian payroll somewhere. However it has come to my attention while my daughter and my granddaughter are here in Macedonia, I, me, myself, haven't taken any holidays for quite a while. Not. Good.

First and foremost it is a terrible example to the hundreds of people I work with, who hear me advocating PTA (protect the asset, and YOU are the asset) regularly, who hear me preaching the genius of the word "no" often, and who read this blog and realize that I don't update it nearly often enough because I of all people have overbooked my life. Do I hear someone saying "is it time for vacation yet?" 

I wrote that I am on vacation for two weeks in my weekly letter on Saturday. Every single letter in response so far has basically said, "YES about time, enjoy!" I have my auto responders on in my three primary email accounts stating that "I am completely unavailable" and so I am actually on vacation right now, and will be for the next couple of weeks.

So why am I blogging one might ask? Well because blogging, is an expression of a life with appropriate margin and space in it. Blogging is a thinking time, an analyzing time, an assessment time, a relaxing time. It represents that I have enough space and time in life to sit on this park bench, enjoy a Cuban cigar, and write my thoughts down on digital paper. As we say in the Balkans, "I am on holidays!"

And I hope to leisurely write a number of these blogs, over the next two weeks, although I may just be absent and not. So far today I have just enjoyed taking care of me, tickling my granddaughter, laughing with the wife and daughter, getting a massage, riding my bike, playing with some new apps, and reading. How is your PTA going?

You can't have it all and neither can I

There are no truer words out there, that we really don't want to hear. Clarity in life often comes down to this statement though, because we need to know that we can't have it all and we must do that terrible horrible thing called choosing. We are forced to make the choices of what we give our attention to and what we focus on. Today I am sitting here in the Zurich Airport, and there is an entire wall taken up with this advertisement, "Am I a good father? Am I working too much? Can I have it all?" Of course, along with a wonderful pic of an eternally happy and joyful family. Everyone is asking this question.

I am returning from 6 days in Berlin Germany where I work with a number of teams and ministries and non-profits. And no matter what the supposed topic of conversation was over those days and in all those different situations, the underlying (often unstated) question was, can I have it all? No you can't and neither can I.

It is known as the "reality of trade offs", no one can have it all or do it all. FOMO indeed (see previous blog)! Greg McKeown points this out graphically in his book "Essentialism" which may be one of the most important books written this decade. He states, "Once we accept the reality of trade-offs we stop asking, “How can I make it all work?” and start asking the more honest question “Which problem do I want to solve?” And it is here that we can start to gain some traction in life, make real progress, resolve some of the thornier issues that plague us.

Once we grasp and accept this truth, then we can start the all important process of eliminating the unimportant from our lives, to paring life down the really meaningful and very significant. To living a beautiful wild life where we change the world, and make our mark on it. While you can't have it all, you can do the amazing.

The astonishing experience of freedom

I worked for my previous employer for 23 years. I lived in the throes of FOMO (fear of missing out), every single day followed a powerful and amazing horrible cycle - no matter how free the day may seem at the beginning, it would fill up by 10 am, and overflow by the afternoon, and find me exhausted by the evening! I said this, pointed this out to my lovely wife over and over, "it's amazing how the day fills up with work work work." That was because I did not know what I should be doing, the one or two absolutely necessary things that I love and can make the best contributions with, and consequently everyone else prioritized my life for me. Every. Day. For. Decades.

Now I have a different challenge, a different experience. Now that I and I alone am prioritizing my life, there is actually space, margin, limits, boundaries, time in my life to do????? Yes, I actually come to a place many days now (every successful day) where I find myself with nothing to DO!! Does this mean I am no longer important? Does this mean that my work load is not heavy enough? Does this mean that I am gonna be bored for the first time since I was a teenager??? No, no and no. However, what it does mean is that I am doing only the right stuff for only the right reasons. It means that I can watch hockey three nights a week. It means I can take my wife out for dinner and not feel like I should still be grinding away at the computer. It means I can leave my phone at home in the evenings and turn it completely off every night. It means I am living exactly in the sweet spot of doing only the significant and meaningful work that I am best suited for, and that I can do better than almost anyone, and I am not chasing endless pointless activity in the name of progress or forward movement.

It means I can enjoy my cigar while watching the moon rising in the east, with a glass of excellent something, with no other pressing matters to be accomplished today. It means that I am free from endless meetings where I have no contribution to make, no reason to be there, and am free to not be there! It means I can call my parents more often, talk longer. Ditto for the kids! It means I can "be here now" and not mentally somewhere else. It is an astonishing experience of freedom, a chance to be still, and not frenetically pushing to the next whatever, because you finished today's super important work, and that is all the work you should be doing.

As this beautiful Seth Godin blog said today, 

"Change is the point. It's what we seek to do to the world around us.

Change, actual change, is hard work. And changing our own minds is the most difficult place to start.

It's also the only place to start.

It's hard to find the leverage to change the way you see the world, hard to pull on your thoughtstraps. But it's urgent."

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices..." William James

Closet cleaning questions and screaming babies

I fly to work these days, or I simply connect to the Internet. Those are the two ways that I go to work. Honestly I much prefer the Internet mode of travel. Currently on a flight from hell with 9 screaming recalcitrant children surrounding me, the whole plane is shaking with the volume and pitch of their screams. In the old country, my mother would state, that "these children are begging for a spanking" but of course having consequences to our actions is not allowed in the modern world, but that is a blog for a different day (btw, these are 2 year old or older children, not infants, and that is a big difference to me).

The Internet is a much friendlier and more peaceful route to make my way to work each day. However, there is much to be said for face to physical face chats and good meals, smells, stories, hanging out, cigars, drinks, laughter, sharing of burdens and struggles, celebrations of the good stuff, etc, etc that simply rarely happen in the virtual meetings online, no matter how good the connection, and no matter how painless the "travel" of getting there. It seems that a balanced mixture of both is required to maximize the leader/developmental dynamic that I am seeking to find.

But right now, I just want to find either some noise-destruction headphones, or help 9 little children go into a deep sleep. I finally understand the whole rationale for adult communities in Florida and other retirement centers - my capacity for endless mindless shrieking unhappy children is almost at zero.

AND the fun did not end once I arrived in Vienna at the airport. I arrived on concourse F. My connecting flight leaves from concourse F, exactly three gates down from my arrival gate. However in typical aviation paranoia I can't just go down the concourse three gates. Even though I got off a secure airplane into a secure airport, with only secure hand baggage, I STILL had to go through passport control and customs AND another full security cycle, in order to make this huge circle in the airport and end up right back where I started. While I enjoyed the walk and the chance to stretch my legs, the purposes of doing so, were only irritating and unnecessary, not much different than 9 screaming children. Oh, and for the record, the second flight has at least one screaming child too. It is simply that kind of day I guess. Let's make the best of it somehow.

When days go like this one, the best way to get back on track is to ask the three "closet-cleaning questions" from the book Essentialism: do I love this? Do I look great in this? And do I wear it often? Translated into my professional world, do I love my work? Is it my best contribution? And is it meaningful and significant? Oh yes! Screaming bambino's be damned!