Are we helping?

Are we helping?

This is a question that is repeatedly coming up in my trek across America. Two blogs back I ranted about the "sweeper" role on our team, and the more I think about it the more I see it as handicapping other adults from taking responsibility for themselves. A second one that is driving me crazy is the expectation to "Chalk the Turns" for those following you in the peloton. I mean you have a Garmin, and an iPhone, and the route sheet hardcopy, why the hell am I supposed to be making chalk marks on the asphalt for you? You have better tools than I do to route your way to our destination. Put your big girl panties on and find your own damn way. Think of it as scouting (Girl Scouts Boy Scouts) and you have a number of compasses and they are all pointing you a certain direction if you would just take the time to USE them, instead of expecting me to stop my ride and make a chalk mark so that you don't have to look at your multiple tools.

So both sweeping and marking penalize the faster (i.e. harder working, sweating, more disciplined) riders, in order to "help" the slower riders. This is complete bullshit. We aren't helping them, we are keeping them helpless in their own minds. Apologies to those who think this is about bicycle groups moving slowly across the USA, the leadership principles here, apply to many of not most other fields of execution. IF this were a race, then these tactics could very well be helpful to the whole team. But since this is not a race, and everyone has permission to travel at their own chosen pace (within limits), then these tactics are not helps at all.

But just so that you don't think I am only pissing and moaning about the slower riders (who I am sorely tempted to call the "complaining" riders, because listening to them non-stop whining about how I did not mark the route with large enough markings, or that we were pushing them too hard as sweeps is getting really old) I am also plenty disappointed about another set of riders who want you to "pull" them along. When you get in a pace line of riders, proper etiquette is that one rider leads for generally about 3-5 minutes and then the next rider in the pace line takes the lead and the front rider goes to the back of the pace line, because being in front is alot more work than being in any other position in the pace line. In fact that is the entire point of sharing that load of leading, so that you can go farther faster and expend less energy as a group. So we have a set of riders who eagerly join my pace line every single day, but never take the lead off my hands. This is complete bullshit. (I actually "pulled" for 22 miles three days ago waiting for someone else to step up and take the lead a single time! Did. Not. Happen.)

I have stopped pulling these people period. I just either stand up on my pedals and outpace them so that they can't keep up or I just stop and take pictures until they are out of sight (although one time last week two of the morons stopped and waited while I took pictures rather than pull their own weight and keep on riding!!) These people are not leaders. They may be fast, they may be strong riders, but they are not leaders. Leaders don't wait for others to take responsibility. Leaders don't wait for others to pull their weight. Leaders lead, and that does not have to happen at the front of the peloton, it can happen wherever you find yourself in the line or process.

The biggest value

The biggest value

For far too often I thought the best value I provided was what I did. But I could not have been more mistaken. Don't get me wrong, doing a job well, with careful excellence has great value.  But not the most value at this stage of life. The biggest value comes in careful thinking, and you absolutely must be alone in order to do that. 

Alone time, thinking time is the single most underrated activity in all my clients worlds, and mine too. Fortunately for me, I actually really enjoy my alone time, actively seek it out, start to feel desperate if I don't get it in regular doses. But my more social peers can't get off the hamster cages of expectation and opportunity for social interaction long enough to get any real thinking done. 

The best work in my opinion involves super intense quiet times followed by robust interactions with the appropriate people. You need the quiet in order to have something significant to contribute at the point of interaction. I am super appalled at how many conversations in the real world are banal nonsense! I have to carefully choose not to help that wasteland continue. Contributing real value requires real work between my ears.

Sweeper? Tradeoffs?

Today I was asked to be sweeper for the team. I said "no thank you" which was really difficult, because most of the folks on this team believe volunteering to be sweeper occasionally to be a critical part of being on this team. Not. Going. To. Happen. Again. I did it already. Once. Can't waste that much time again (five extra hours) for such weak reasons. First of all I don't agree with the Fuller Center's insistence for sweepers. I mean who sweeps the sweepers? It is redundant nonsense. (Sweepers are the two people who stay behind the slowest members of the group to make sure everyone gets where they are suppose to go, and there are so many assumptions at play here I can't even start to explain) Who makes certain the sweepers arrive? How is that any different than the last person in the peloton doing that themselves and (horror of horrors) taking responsibility for themselves! Read the route sheet for pity sakes! Use a stinking GPS that is on every single phone if nothing else! Get a life people!

Moreover I need to write you. This is a far more productive activity than babysitting people who don't meet the minimal requirements for riding on a trip like this, (12 miles per hour is a minimal requirement and if you can't ride that fast, stay home or work out more but don't waste my life). I need to work with my clients around the world. They are changing the world and I want to be a part of that, not watch some pre-menopausal over-weight woman stay stuck in 1st gear for 91 miles. 

So I will strive to be more attentive, encouraging, helpful, hard working with the chore teams, first to volunteer for work that others don't want (which are practivcally helpful to the team), but I have to stay firm in my refusal to squander my life in pointless activities, even when those around me perceives them to be important. It's called a tradeoff.

Up and down these monsters

We have been crossing Colorado and Wyoming at a frantic pace this week. Frantic in a bicycle sense, not a car/motorcycle sense. The Rocky Mountains are serious climbs and descents, and I have a burnt all my available energies this week, making my way up and down these monsters. I think I could go to bed at 7 pm each day! Of course the schedule does not allow for that, and so I have to stay up late each night and get up early each morning.

Because of all that is going on in my life right now, the beautiful fatigue I have each day is perfect. It keeps me level and balanced and just tired enough that I don't join in every fight/conversation/discussion/argument I am invited to attend. However it has a downside, in that I don't have nearly enough bandwidth to emotionally navigate all the relationships in my life, especially the ones that surround me on this adult camping trip known as The Fuller Bicycle Adventure.  I am discovering that when in such a state, that I don't have nearly as much patience or tolerance or longsuffering as I normally experience in my life. I have less willingness to allow others to dominate, or win, or perhaps rather it's a super sensitivity to the finely-tuned abuses of leadership, or position or power. In other words, long story short, I am that curmudgeon that I always suspected that I was. No one is less surprised than I am.

The reality that I take away from this, is that much of what I do and say and my public persona is relatively shallow and skin deep. Those important characteristics and core virtues are not nearly as foundational nor deeply embedded as I would like them to be. I have a great deal of work and restructuring to do still . . . yet knowing these deficits is at least half the battle, and perhaps the most necessary starting point. Your can't change what you don't know for sure needs changing. You can't address that which you are not convinced needs improvement. So the exploding awareness that I still have quite a ways to grow, is a gigantic step in the right direction. This is the up and down of the real monster.

The completely me me

Today we crossed into Colorado from Utah. Utah was spectacular. I had flown into Salt Lake City some 19-20 years ago, and I had driven into tiny snippets of the state before, but nothing like this slow four days in state on a bicycle - it was amazing. Let's hope Colorado offers as much along the route that has been selected for us. Spent the afternoon talking to my peeps and texting my niece and listening to folks struggles with life and death.

But my daily speed bumps concerning my brother's death 8 weeks ago are slowly growing smaller I think. These three plus weeks on this trip across the USA have been wonderfully brutal and therapeutic. The 1400 miles we have traveled so far have been so scenic there are almost no words to express how beautiful the trip has been so far. Yes yes yes I understand Nebraska and Iowa are coming, but flat cornfields have their own beauty I am hoping. If they don't, some other place in my near future will and I can wait.

The best part is that I don't have to BE anything for anyone on this trip. Sure I still have clients and I have affiliates and I do have to care for them, and I call my parents every single day, but the 25 people that I am crossing the country with on the FCBA tour, I have never met before and after the trip will likely never see again. There is a much needed freedom in this adult camping trip I find myself on right now, where everything is tight and significant, but temporary. There is a never experienced (for me at least) freedom to completely be whatever I need to be today kind of feel to this. I don't have to bring my best self to work, nor do I have to bring my business suit out, nor do I have to be the leadership guru, nor do I have to be "the missionary" or "the pastor", instead I just get to be me. The me of this moment. The completely me me of today. My only worry is that I might not want to go back to my other life.

Making the most of it!

Sitting in Heber City Utah, enjoying a fine beverage from the breweries in Maryland, a hamburger made from the cows I see in the pasture before me, snow still on the peaks even in mid July, and so many other things to appreciate about this moment, this beautiful Saturday. So much to be thankful for, so much to be blessed by, so much that I get to do. 

A number of people have questioned how I can get up at 4:45 am everyday and then bike 80-100 miles a day with our group? What they don't understand is that I GET to do this. It is no chore, it is no hardship, because I remind myself 49 times day that I get to do this. This one small window in my life where I don't have to work my normal schedule, where I don't have to keep my usual office hours, where I get to survey the Rocky Mountians slowly and completely each day at 15 miles per hour. It is awesome and I won't likely get another chance to do this. Making the most of it!

No language is acceptable at the most frustrating dinner ever

One of the most frustrating and amazing phenomena in dealing with 20 somethings as I travel the world, is that every single phrase and word choice and adjective that I speak, they can find something objectionable about it. There are no possible solutions to this challenge on my side. Because no matter what language I choose to employ, one of them will find something wrong with it. Simple speech does not exist any longer. Straightforward conversation cannot happen any longer. Truth can't exist nor thrive in an environment where every word is loaded with assumptions and implications in the mind of the 20 something. Regardless of the topic, homosexuality, people of color, trafficking, orphans, churches (and all these terms I just used in this sentence are also objectionable in some fashion!) they are all loaded.

Don't get me wrong, I love 20 somethings. All three of my young adult children are 20 somethings. They are very special people. But in their conversations with me, they assume the best possible meaning of each statement, of each sentence, of each vulnerability. Whereas, the 20 somethings I just had dinner with, assume every possible slight, harm, evil intention, wrong morals, bad character, and worse possible position to each word that comes out of my mouth. There is no possible way to have a conversation in that context. While we are both speak a form of the English language, we have attached different meanings to each of the words that we are speaking, and thus, while we technically "understand" what the other person is saying, we completely lose and forsake the true and actual meaning of what was said, it feels like (and this is coming from a totally multi-lingual person) like I am speaking English and you are speaking Greek. There is not much communication taking place.

And once you feel this horrible communication doldrum, and experience the agony of failed shared meanings, you see that it happens in so many spheres of the world, business, politics and society in general. We use the same words in general, but attach completely different meanings and nuances to those words, and so the results are unpredictable, and are very much like hugging a cactus. #themostfrustratingdinnerever

Too hot to be used

Yesterday I got a message on my phone that I had never seen before. It said that the "iPhone was too hot and could not be used at the moment" or something similar and it had a thermometer icon there showing red. Of course I would need the phone at that exact moment to determine if we were heading in the wrong direction or not! Thats what I get for leaving the phone in the sun. And I was very surprised to hear that almost everyone in the group that I was with at that moment had received similar messages on their phones or iPads, because this was a first for me. In Asia, my iPads get very hot.

I think we often allow our lives to get overclock, over-revved and over-heated too, and we can't really function until the temperature comes down to a manageable level. Self care and self awareness are at least two ways to stay on top of this problem and PTA - protect the asset - you and me. We need to monitor how hot our lives are getting and take appropriate steps to keep them in the prime operating range, in our high performance range. We can't expect to bring our best selves in the arena in our leadership if we don't watch the stovetop and make sure things aren't boiling over.

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.