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!

Quitting or getting it done!

The difference between quitting and achieving our goals? The right mix of willpower and planning, according to Michael Hyatt. I have already been doing this for decades, and didn't know it! The official phrase is "intention implementation." You anticipate the obstacles and once plans are made to remove them, you just do it, you get it done. 

Scroll back to May 1995, some of you weren't even alive then, but for those of us who were, we can go back into our memories and see and remember where we were and what we were doing with whom. Me? I was living deep in the former Soviet Union back then, and I was a basket case health wise. Over the years I have learned that I eat my way through stress, and boy was I ever doing that well back then. I weighed 295 pounds give or take 5 or 10, and I was a walking talking time bomb. At the end of the first week in May 1995, I had a brain aneurysm. Long story short, it's simply a miracle and gift from God that I survived it at all.

Today I am 165 pounds and I have little stress in life, and I am very very healthy. After the aneurysm I started exercising. Every day. Every week. Every year. And have pretty much every day for the last 20 years. Every day for the most part. Perhaps 1-3 days per month, my work and schedule keep me from doing that, but I exercise pretty much every day. I have evolved to use this "intention implementation " to make sure that it happens every day.

Now I don't weigh 165 pounds because I exercise every day. I weigh 165 pounds because I eat like a 165 pound person. That is simple portion control and nutrition. Exercise provides fitness, not a calorie deficit. I have vascular health because of exercise. But I digress. This is about doing it every day. The difference between quitting and achieving our goals. We remove the obstacles and then just do it. I can't imagine a life without exercise now. 

I also can't imagine my life weighing 295 pounds any longer, or working a super high stress job where no good deed goes unpunished, or working with people who are negative and vicious, or working with a team that is filled with jealousy or envy, or spending my days with clients who only celebrate my failures, etc etc. you can apply "intention implementation " to every area of life, and achieve all the goals that you have for yourself. Quitting? What's that??

FOMO

FOMO

This "fear of missing out" is fracturing our one and only real choice in a time-obsessed western mindset - our focus, or if you prefer, our attention. We can blame the company we work for, or the spouse we married, or the expectations we place on ourselves, but FOMO is driving us to waste our focus and attention on the insignificant and BSOs (bright shiny objects) in life. Usually they are in essence whatever makes the most noise, email, phone calls, information overload, project overclocking and expectations of never missing out on any single opportunity ever in our short lives.

I once was that kind of person. Now I am aiming toward, and sometimes succeeding, at being an essentialist, as Gregg McKeown describes it, the diligent pursuit of less but better.  There are however a number of things that are undermining my success. While I personally am no longer caught in the mindless FOMO, almost everyone around me still is, and their FOMOs are urgently trying to feed mine, engage mine, overwhelm my resistance, overburden me with their FOMOs. This sabotage is amazingly constant and persistent. My daily clarity about . . . well, what I am about, has never needed more shoring up and defenses than now.

While I am not trying to convince anyone that FOMO is negative, I have merely come to the conclusion that it is negative for me. I cannot live all of the options that come my way, nor can I experience every possibility, nor can I even pursue most of them because many of them are in conflict with one another. As a friend told me this week, when listening to a breathtaking example of guitar virtuoso, that he would "give up parts of his manhood to have skill of that level" what he really said although he did not realize it, is that he is unwilling to commit to the endless hours of practice that this represents - the one desire is in conflict with his other desires. He cannot live the life of a guitar virtuoso, because he also wants so many other things . . . more than he wants to be a guitar virtuoso, irregardless of the claims to parceling out significant manly body parts.

FOMO is driving him crazy. I plainly told him that he could indeed be a virtuoso, and he immediately responded with the question "how". Oh about 10,000 hours of practice practice practice, I told him. Well that is not practical he responded, and he is totally correct. He can't live the life he has, AND the life of a virtuoso. Either or, yes, but both, no. And so he has made a choice, an unwilling unhappy choice from his point of view, a necessary and inescapable choice from my point of view. The only way to overcome the life of fractured focus and attention, is to realize that this is the only real currency I have to spend, and I need to spend it carefully, wisely and thoughtfully.

The moon and the cross

I am sitting outside on my balcony on a balmy summer evening with a great view of a 3/4 moon and the cross on the top of Mt Vodno. The moon is reflecting the sun light and the cross reflects the Son's love. It is a great time to stop at the end of a long but highly productive day and be grateful, thoughtful and content.

Sometimes you have to go back to go forward

I learned a ton of lessons today and will blog about some of them, but the most amazing one was that sometimes you have to go back (or backwards) in order to move forward or in order to make real progress.

My dad is an amazing engineer with an 8th grade education. He rebuilds antique cars with a passion that is energizing and awe inspiring with breathtaking results. All this with no formal training or schooling. Today's lesson came from a simple brake job on my ancient Japanese made pickup. We disassembled one side, leaving the other side intact. He has told me many times over the years that he takes “mental photographs” to remember how to reassemble whatever he is working on. I have none of this ability and that is probably why I never became a mechanic like him, even though I really enjoy tinkering with tools and engines.

We did this project together, because my dad is 75 years old and he simply can't physically do all that he was able to even in the recent past. As we attempted to reassemble the brake assembly, we repeatedly failed to attach a particular spring that was in the back. You guessed it, we eventually had to backup and disassemble the whole thing again, in order to install this particular spring and have a completed brake assembly. 

This is important because I had to do the second brake! Dad was out of gas, and thankfully I had paid careful attention the first time around. Long story short, this backing up process in order to move forward, enabled me to complete the second rebuild much more quickly and correctly the first time, than we experienced on the first rebuild even though the “master” was doing the first one.

What a great teaching tool and what a great learning process! This has lots of applications to other areas of expertise. As I am sure you can make many applications yourself, I will only make a one directly related to my area of work. When something isn't working, it often pays to back up, disassemble, start over or retrace your steps, in order to find the point of failure or disconnect or dysfunction. When a client is struggling to accomplish a goal, task or level of development, sometimes we need to wind things back until we find the fly in the ointment! Then we can start to make forward progress as the disabling spring is resolved. I did this mentally this past week as I spent several days traveling by car alone. I was able to “back up” and find the missing piece, the missing step to why several projects and clients were stalled, and we were not making any forward progress. I was also able to disassemble several problematic situations and find the missing spring that was preventing me from finding a good resolution. What about you? Where might you benefit by backing up in order to move forward?

How to drive a go-cart from PA to FL

Well it is almost a go-cart. In reality it is an ancient Isuzu Pup pickup with a quarter of a million miles on it, literally. Most people, all those who are sane, would never even begin a trip of this distance with such an old and worn vehicle. However I am not sane, much to my chagrin, and I am on this trip. It has let me down only once (so far) and prayerfully that little episode has been resolved. The key to driving something well past its prime condition is two fold: excellent care and a sustainable pace, neither of which mean what you may think. Let me explain.

Excellent care is not only regular maintenance, although that can not be allowed to lapse. Excellent care means to understand the nature of the mechanism, that it is a machine, and that parts wear out, that they need replacing even though they are not part of regular maintenance. This applies to our PTA as leaders in a complete and whole way. We have to recognize (read self-awareness) and understand the mechanism, that we are social, linguistic, relational, limited, finite creatures. We have limits, and those change over time. Sometimes you even have to get parts taken out or replaced that are not part of regular maintenance! Consistent PTA = excellent care in the leader's world.

Sustainable pace for a nearly go-cart type vehicle is not Interstate Highway Speed. It actually probably never was for this type of low geared small truck. But for sure it isn't the typical 78-82 mph that cars routinely travel down the vast interstate highway system in this country today. A sustainable pace for this vehicle is 60-62 mph max. My best sustainable pace, and your best sustainable pace is much slower than you think as well. And it takes a great deal of discipline to maintain that pace which is so much slower than everyone else's pace! In 2500+ miles of driving this truck at 60 mph on the interstate, I have only passed broken down vehicles and pedestrians - everyone else blows past me like a rocket! 

On the other hand, I noticed two things; that most people pass me multiple times over the course of driving down the road (which means our actual forward progress is closer than you would think) and that I am still moving forward (which is the whole point of driving at 60, that it keeps moving!) This informs us much about sustainable pacing, and I am sure you can see a dozen apparent lessons for yourself in the metaphor. I actually am living this successfully most of the time in my life as a leader. Some observations: I am much happier, content, alive, balanced than I was before in the hyper-ratrace we call productivity; I can more and more "be here now" in this moment rather than living in the next trip, curve, project, task, etc; and I can see that I am far far more productive in fewer hours than before. In fact recent research suggests at we produce as much in 11 hours now, that was produced in a 40 hour work week back in 1950. All the more reason to live a sustainable pace, you already are producing far more than generations before. But a sustainable pace for a 53 year old guy is slower than you would think, I easily have the equivalent of a quarter of a million miles on me, and I need to own that wear and tear in a responsible way. The results can be astonishing.

The dilemma of need and want

I have been on a long trip across America, some 4000 plus miles so far, and there is the most curious thing ever that I have seen this visit, a Cadillac pickup truck. I know that some of you, perhaps many of you, haven't even noticed. But to me, an occasional visitor to this great country, they stick out like a giraffe armadillo. No, there is no such animal that I know of, but a Cadillac pickup truck seems just as unlikely to me. Having grown up on a small farm, where a truck was a working tool not a transportation statement, this does not compute.

As I work with clients that are USA based I have noticed a similarly unlikely expectation. They can't say no. They have no clarity about the difference between a want and a need, a passion and a calling, a Should and a Must. I spend much of my time listening to how ovwhelmed and overclocked their lives are, and how this whole experience just happens to them. I am deeply sympathetic. I understand pressures from multiple directions and sources. I get how many opportunities can come your way, especially at the peak of your working years. I resonate with the confusing options that come at even ordering food at a restuarant.

However, each yes is a no to something else, and each no a potential yes to some other more valuable event or activity. Only you are responsible for your yeses and your no's. I know you don't want to hear that, and I don't want that responsibility either, but there it is. It will never change. Ever. You can never escape from this, you can only choose. When you do not think you are choosing, you have chosen. There is no where to lay the blame, there is no one to lay this responsibility on, there is no one but the face you see in the mirror. There are Cadillac pickups, but they are neither Cadillacs nor pickups. Wants and needs are not the same vehicle either. Have clarity. See clearly. Chose. Or someone else will make the choice for you.

Systems revamped!

I had a real embarrassment today, like I haven't had in years. I completely and totally forgot about a very important meeting. 15 minutes after I should have been there and on point, I get a phone call, and BAM instant awareness that I had majorly blown it!

Now that I have done as much damage control as I can exert today, I am sitting in a near empty cafe (because it is raining), drinking a mineral water, with a Nicaraguan and my mobile office, reviewing what happened and how it could have been prevented. It is like Peter Senge's seminal text The Fifth Discipline, came back to haunt me. Calm my racing heart! The very systems that I use to be as effective as any three other people, those very structures, my over-reliance on them, created a hole, and I fell into it.

This is a very important lesson, that I not grow weary of redundancy in my systems of execution, that I not  become casual about what I have allowed other people to place on my schedule, that I not let down my guard in the pursuit of excellence, that I always under-promise and over-deliver.