Musings

This one is simple: everyone wants to be heard.

I have found no exceptions to this rule over the years.  Everyone has a story. Everyone wants to tell their story. Everyone wants their story to be heard. Whether in a crowded room or in the most intimate, quiet moments between two people, we all yearn to use our voice and be heard for who we are and what we have to say.

I could elaborate and try to make a better case.  I just don’t think it’s necessary to do so.  

Everyone wants to be heard.

The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways of the United States of America was authorized in 1956 by then-President Eisenhower.  The system, as originally designed, was declared complete in 1992.  It currently encompasses 47,856 miles of paved highway.  It is second in the world only to China’s network.

Interstate 80 (I-80) is a transcontinental portion of the Eisenhower Interstate System.  It run from downtown San Francisco, CA, on the West Coast of the United States to Teaneck, NJ, in the New York City Metro Area.  I-80 encompasses 2,899 miles, making it the second longest highway in the system following I-90 (3,020 miles).  I-80 rolls through 11 states: California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.  Over the course of the past nine years, I have driven every mile of it.  

Of course, the drive itself didn’t take me nine years.  I-80 reduced what was a two-month journey at the beginning of the 1900’s to a reasonable 5-day journey, coast to coast, if driven straight through.  My journey on I-80 began nine years ago when I first drove from Illinois to California.  To be more precise, it started in the San Francisco Bay Area on the return journey home to Illinois.  I covered most of I-80 from San Francisco to the Chicago area, skipping a section as I diverted to Denver.  Several years later, as I drove to California again, I covered that section of I-80.  By about 2010, I’d covered every mile from Chicago to California, as well as every mile from Chicago east to the intersection of I-80 and State Highway 8 just north of Akron, OH.  Over the course of the next several years, I slid back and forth from Chicago to the East Coast States of the US along 80 countless times, always inching closer, but never quite reaching, Teaneck, NJ.  It would take 5 more years until I would reach the eastern terminus of I-80, connecting to I-95 north and the George Washington Bridge into New York City. 

Every one of the 2,899 miles that make up I-80, from California to New Jersey, passed beneath me, my hands on the wheels of about four or five different vehicles.  I have seen America, up close, from one coast to the other.  I’ve watched the urban jungle of New York City sublime into the suburbs of New Jersey.  I’ve watched those suburbs turn into the Smoky Mountains of Pennsylvania.  The woods mountains turned into rolling hills that made way to the field of the Midwest.  For hundreds of miles, I followed those fields as they again turned to hills and grasslands, the grasslands making way to desert and a Great Salt Lake.  The desert hills turned into mountains, and those mountains kept growing into the Great Rocky Mountains.  I drove over those mountains, through the legendary Donner Pass, then down into the valleys and flatlands of California, onward until the Great Road disappears somewhere along the western end of the Bay Area Bridge and into the very city of San Francisco.  I’ve seen it all, driven it all.  Every last mile.

Our planet is small.  We forget this.  We are tiny in comparison, so it seems so huge at times.  But if a man like me, without even trying, can traverse the entirety of a continent within their lifetime, then the smallness of this rocky orb should be evident.  I could jump on an airplane right now, on Monday, head out to Seattle, WA, and begin the trek across I-90, the longest US highway, tomorrow.  I’d be in Boston, MA, by the end of the weekend.  I’d see some pretty amazing things along the way, too.  3020 miles, the total length of I-90, is 12% of the total circumference of the Earth herself.  The planet is small, my friend.  Very small.  Just 24,901 miles around.  I’ve owned cars long enough to be nearly 300,000 miles.  That’s 12 laps around the planet.  Again, not very big.

I feel humbled, honored, and very, very grateful as I sit here and contemplate my journey across my America along Interstate 80.  I do not take her for granted.  I do not take the liberty and freedom I enjoy, the very things that make such a journey possible, for granted, either.  I am fortunate, beyond words and beyond measure.  It has been a great trip, and now it is over.  2899 miles is a long way to travel.  I think I will rest now.

For tomorrow, the next journey begins…

This is a realization that I had the other day: when you commit to not “giving them your best” you are, in fact, giving them the best you have to offer.

If you keep “your best” to yourself, then you are living, consciously, a life of unrealized potential.  That is one of the saddest, most wasteful things that you can do to yourself.  You are robbing the world of you.  You are robbing us of your greatest impact just to spite a handful of others who probably don’t really even care.  If you feel the need to rob them, then they certainly don’t matter to your best outcomes, do they?  The haters will smirk, content that they boxed you in and defeated you.  The people who do care, those who you don’t even know yet and who could potentially benefit most from what you have to offer, are the ones you actually wind up robbing.  They are the ones who you wind up hurting.  You’re giving them the best of the worst you.

Pretty selfish, huh?  Even if you don’t care enough about yourself to honor the best “you” that you can be, perhaps some compassion and caring for others might spur you on to action.

Posted this elsewhere last month but thought it worth bringing home to this blog:

If you hesitate, if you blink too long, postpone too much, you become the person you swore you’d never be.

Remember that dinosaur you met when you first started working? The one who always told you stories of how it used to be? The one who longed for the return to “the good ol’ days”? The one who took really long breaks, opposed every new idea, and, frankly, often seemed a little scared of tomorrow? Blink too long, and you’ll be staring at that person in the mirror. Not because they are standing behind you like in a horror movie but because you’ve become that person. That’s now you…and that’s a different kind of horror movie.

Dinosaurs end up as fossils or fossil fuel. Or they never leave a trace at all. Don’t become a dinosaur. Age, by the way, has nothing to do with it. Believe it or not, age changes. Trust me.

Decide your own fate.

Passion.  Another loaded word.  I believe that part of the reluctance people tend to have about listen to others go on about their passion is that we feel like we’ve heard these inspiring reels before but without a lot of result.  As my friend the Buddhist monk used to say, “I hear a lot of noise coming from the kitchen…pots and pans and all that…but I don’t smell any cooking.”

Let’s be honest: we’ve all experienced both sides.  On the one hand, we’ve rolled our eyes (perhaps subtly or internally) when listening to someone talking about their passion.  On the other hand, we’ve been fired up and passionate about something to the point that we need to tell everyone we know about it…and then sorta faded back into the comfy impression we’ve made on the Couch of Life.

The thing about the idea of being passionate about something, about being totally jazzed and fired up, is that it sparks the tiniest little fire inside of us that, in turn, wells up into that horrible 4-letter word that gets us all in trouble:

HOPE.

Acknowledging passion inspires hope.  It’s the hope of the ignorant and optimistic and idealistic and inexperienced.  Then some bad things happen in life, hopes begins to falter, and…we’re back on the couch.  This vicious, demoralizing cycle happens over and over again as we navigate our existence, and our hearts are broken more times than we can count.

Then it happens again.  HOPE.

Sustainable passion requires hope that will not go away.  As my friend Jeff recounted during a recent conversation we had (that we recorded for your listening pleasure), passion is “what we’re made for.”  Not his words, mind you, but the words of an 11-year-old.  Passion is hope, and hope is flammable.  That’s what gets us in trouble.  The fire of hope can get so out of control that we get burned in the process.  That risk is enough to assume that seat on the couch again.

My remedy: don’t call it passion.  Call it something else if doing so moves you to action.  Otherwise, stick with passion.  It’s not a bad word.  The important thing is to feel the burn deep inside.  EVERYONE needs fire inside to get the engine running.  Internal combustion.  Another sound concept.  Some of us need more fire than others, but we all need it.  We all find ways to get it.  When we get enough, it inspires us.  It forces us to move, to take action.  Heaven forbid we get the intended results.  Then momentum kicks in.  It can all get pretty scary pretty quick.  Before the scare moves in, though, we get that sublime feeling of awesomeness.

That, my friend, is passion.

The art of applied passion is something I like to call Boomcraft.

In Trueness, all great things are found. They are great because they are the thing that move us to do more, to be more, to aspire to more than we did the day before.

When people connect to their Trueness, what they do with their time cannot help but have profound and connected meaning.

What the heck is Trueness? Funny you should ask. My friend Jeff and I talk about it over at his site, JeffBrunson.com. Come on over and have a listen.

Before I keep moving along with this train of thought I started last week (and it is a train, trust me), I figured I’d pause on this cold and icy Monday evening to share some of the best unsolicited and unheeded advice I’ve been given in the past year or so.  It comes from a common source of wisdom in my life, my good friend Jeff.  Not too long ago, he said this to me:

“Don’t worry about writing a book from scratch.  Edit the book you’ve already written.”

I can’t recall the exact context or circumstances, but the words have been ringing in my ears for months.  They keep coming back to me every time I sit down and write something because everything I write is another part of another chapter in this book that I’ve been inadvertently (and advertently?) authoring.  This writing happens on loose sheets of paper, in notebooks, on the internet, in email, and even in texts.  I am building a series of thoughts and ideas, elaborating on them, and weaving a tapestry that, although incoherent at first glance, will become a work that I can share.  And I will share.

For me, it’s writing, but for you it is something else.  Well, maybe it is writing, too, but it doesn’t have to be.  You are producing a work of art in everything you do.  What are you creating?  And will you share it with the world?

Heed the advice: edit what you have already written.  Chance are, you are much farther along than you realize.  For my part, the editing has begun.

Now I just need a proofreader…

When I was knee-deep in IT break-fix several years ago, a former computer engineer with the US Marine Corps taught me a key lesson about troubleshooting problems. He shared with me a basic technique an old electrical engineer had taught him. If a circuit isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do, test it from the beginning of the circuit to the midpoint. If it works, treat the midpoint as the new starting point. Test from there to the midpoint between it and the end of the circuit. If it works, make that the new starting point and test to the midpoint between it and the end of the circuit. Keep doing that until your test fails. You’ve now isolated the problem between two points along the path. Start working backward, treating the last successful test point as the new starting point and the failed midpoint as the new end. This isolates testing to a specific segment of the path. Test to midpoint, and start the process over again and again until you find the problem.

It makes sense if you like electrical stuff. At least, it made sense to me. What stuck with me about the lesson in troubleshooting is that many of life’s problems can be solved in a similar manner. I built my technical career on the principle that any technology problem can be broken down into parts until a solution is derived. There is always a start and an end, so there is always a midpoint for testing.

When I moved into roles that focused more on project management, my brain processed problems in a certain way, and I quickly learned that the way I processed problems applied itself nicely to projects. I began to see all problems as projects…and all projects as problems that required solutions. The pattern that I applied was simple: a project starts, it ends, and somewhere along the way there is a midpoint. Instead of testing to midpoint, though, the question became one of what happens between start and midpoint. In project management, a midpoint is referred to as a milestone. As one derives midpoints between points, more milestones emerge. Some aren’t as important as others, and they are referred to as tasks. In project management, solutions are just the critical path from the start to the finish of a project.

Eventually, it dawned on me that the ability to shape my life lies in my ability to find solutions based on midpoints, milestones, and tasks. While this may appear to be an over-simplification of some of the complexities of life, my peace of mind comes from the knowledge that the basic methodology as an approach to survival works. I have proof. My proof is my life. Most of the great accomplishments in my life are the result of approaching the path to the goal as a series of milestones and tasks that get me from here to there. I uncover the path by observing the present, envisioning the preferred future, then discerning the midpoint. From there, determining the steps along the path becomes far less intimidating.

It’s not easy, but it is simple. In life, I find that shaping our paths is the same: not easy but simple. Complexity can be simple when approached methodically. This is what an electrical circuit taught me about life.

Commitment to rejecting hesitation? Check.

Commitment to your secret ingredient, your undeniable presence and awesomeness, your Boomcraft? Check.

OK. Uh…what now?

Now, we pause for purpose. Not “lightning out of the blue” purpose, but “focus for my lifetime” purpose. I know, it sound daunting, but it’s really not. There isn’t a formula, per se, for finding your truth, but there are people making inroads into the nature of purpose and how we share that with the world. They are out there, studying it, doing their best to share what they learn. Sure, some are selling. They sell promises and processes and models and things like that. Don’t begrudge them their living, of course, but be wary of what you’re being sold. Don’t fall for the idea that “the model works, so if this winds up being a dud for you…well…it’s your fault!” The truth is that, yes, it does have mainly to do with you or me, not so much the model, but the model, whichever model, is as much a dud as the person upon whom dudding has occurred.

You see, people are not mathematical equations. We are not a series of variables, any of which can be “solved for” in the absolute mathematical sense. Our variables are just that: variable. What works for one will likely not work for another. What works for one today may likely not work tomorrow or some point in the future. The model, the solution, must resonate with the individual. The frequency has to vibrate in the same way for both so that good things can happen. That said, there is one thing that all models for discerning purpose that I’ve come across have in common: they contain an element of introspection. At some point, the individual must stop to take that long, hard look inside to figure out what makes them tick.

Aaron Hurst, Arthur Woods, and the good people over at imperative are serving up one method for taking that hard look within. Their work is focused on finding patterns in the population and helping the individual connect to their special pattern. From there, the work begins. Kevin McCarthy is helping people be on-purpose. His work is focused on…well…purposeful focus. Kevin’s methodology requires a close examination of not only what the individual values but how they choose to spend their time. The common element is finding meaning through turning the gaze inward before looking to apply any sense of purpose to the world outside. They both have merit and impact. I know; I’ve worked through them both. They resonated.

With resonance and honest self-evaluation, purpose can come into focus. Then focus can become the next step.

Now that you’ve decided to leave hesitation behind you, what do you do next? Some say that the commitment to move forward generates motion and opportunity in the Universe. The Universe is waiting for you to commit in your heart, an act that sends ripples of energy outward, notifying opportunity, serendipity, and other mysteries forces that you are open for business. Or maybe not. Others say that words are great, but they don’t mean much without action.

The great thing about the eternal case of action v non-action is that the winner is easy to discern: it is action every single time. Why? Because non-action is action. We choose non-action over action, and choice is action. Choosing nothing over something is still choosing. Thinking that we can avoid the hard work and pain of making choices by refusing to make them is a trick, y’all, one the Lizard Brain inserts into our thinking all the time. The fact of the matter is that “chain action” is what is required to move from idea to…thing…whatever that thing might be. Isolated action expends energy, may garner some result, and is almost always of limited potential. Action with purpose, action with forethought, and action with subsequent action, however, are all ways to build momentum, and the Universe loves momentum. Momentum and movement make it easier for opportunity to find you. Or for you to find it.

Enter Boomcraft. Boomcraft is the sensation others get when you walk into the room. It is your presence at a meeting. It is your idea at a brainstorming session. It is your post in the blogosphere. Boomcraft is your product. Boomcraft is what you bring to the table. Boomcraft is why people keep asking for you. Boomcraft is the sound of your awesomeness unleashed. Did the windows just rattle? You bet your ass they did. That was your Boomcraft making itself known.

Nearly every day, I take ideas and start them down the path to becoming something more than ethereal thoughts. I make things out of nothing. That is my Boomcraft. What is yours?