As good as you let it!

It occurred to me yesterday as I was finally making my first post that I hadn’t really put enough time into naming this little venture.  I ended up with “As good as you let it” for a multitude of reasons.  

It could have been “Unvarnished” which is where most of us like to reside, in our “natural state” without the veneer that we wear each day.  There are problems with this though.  Unvarnished, we’ll age a little too quickly, we’re susceptible to spills, dents and dings much more so than when we have our veneer on.  Unvarnished, it is much more easy to see the “real” us, knots, defects, imperfections, all of it, raw and exposed.  I happen to accept my veneer, it is part of me.  It does not dominate me, make me unreal or deceitful. 

Let’s use another word, let’s call it our “uniform.”  When a ball player steps onto the field he wears the correct uniform.  We all accept this as part of the game.  It doesn’t change the man playing the game; it is what he wears when he plays the game.  To the extent that a person is genuine to himself (or herself), the uniform is meaningless. 

So for me, unvarnished is just a bit to angry, it suggests there is a disconnect between my corporate self and my “real self.”  There isn’t.

“Make it a great day”

Many people have received an email from me with the closing, “Make it a great day,” I did this for years, how many I can’t recall.  It was a deliberate attempt to remind people to do their best to make each day the best that it can be. (Cue Army commercial).  I like this; it works for me.  As I’ve continued to mature? Age? Grow?  (Mental note for another Blog topic) I’ve become less comfortable with it though.  Why? 

Let’s start with the definition of make:  “to cause to exist, occur, or appear.”  So then we could change “make it a great day” to “cause a great day to exist.”   Bear with me here, I believe we can MAKE great things happen; we can MAKE great coffee; we can make a great financial decision; we can even make great love (well hopefully anyway! J ) but can we make a great day?  I don’t think so.  I think most of the days, most of the time are already great.  Name your spiritual leader, God, Buddha, Allah, ( I will not engage you in religious debate. I respect you and your views and ask you to respect mine.)  I believe he or she or it or they made it great.  Our responsibility is not to MAKE it a great day…  Our responsibility is to LET it be a great day.

You see there is greatness in your life.  You are surrounded by it.  It is a smile, a wink, a flirt, a kiss.  It is a project well done.  Greatness is all around you.  Don’t believe me, lay your ear upon the chest of one you love and listen to her heart beat.  Watch a child laugh out loud – the real-down-to-the-marrow-of-your-being kind of laugh.  Savor a sip of wine, or the sweet taste of hard work coming to a successful fruition. 

So, my email closing no longer says “make it a great day.”  Quite frankly, you’re just not big enough to MAKE it a great day.  It now says “All the best” which means that I wish you all of the best that life has to offer.  I wish you joy, success and wellness.  Most of all, I wish you the wisdom to understand that every day of your life will be AS GOOD AS YOU LET IT be.

Keep working and striving and climbing and hoping and dreaming.  Just don’t ever….EVER stop savoring the greatness along the way.  The more you recognize it, the more you’ll have.

Chasing the Brassring…

 

This whole blogging thing started because I’ve always wanted to write and a former colleague “About the Same” has been writing a blog about her experiences as she goes through her own personal career change.  Like me she was in advertising. Like me, she gave up that career to pursue something she loved.  In her case it was teaching.  In my case, I left the security and comfort of my work in Human Resources at my current employer to pursue sales for the company.  In some ways you could call this my “brass ring.”  More than a few dozen people think I am a raving lunatic for making this kind of a transition at this stage of my career.  I was “set” in my previous role.  Well respected, I had a large staff and a meaningful budget, heck I even had a really great admin, who, even with all of her kinks and curiosities, I adored because she took care of me, did what I asked of her and really cared about making me shine.  (Her biggest kink/curiosity…she liked working with me…TALK ABOUT WEIRD!!)  I EVEN let her edit my grammar…talk about trust!

NOW, I am MR Junior guy on the totem pole again.  Heck, at the moment, I am not even selling, I am a coordinator.  If this sounds like a step back, well that’s simply because it is.  In the words of my darling daughter who stopped by “cube” and said…”what happened to your office?  You got downgraded!” 

Or did I?

You see, I love selling.  I love putting deals together and solving client problems. I love change; I look for things that are broken, or need to be broken; I finish breaking them; I help fix them.   I arrived at my employer as a sales person.  At the time I was selling advertising to HR.  I spent 4 years changing things from inside the organization.  I loved what I was doing.  I REALLY Loved it.  I could go back to doing it tomorrow and I would have a great time.  There was only ONE tiny eensy little teeny weenie thing missing.  I wasn’t directly creating profit for the company.  So here I am out on the end of a long limb, swaying in the breeze, from time to time hanging on by a few fingers.  Only time will tell if I am brilliant or a stark raving lunatic.  That said, I won’t wander the planet going… “I wonder what would happen if I would’ve…”

For me, I needed to do this because I’ve raised my kids telling them that they can do anything they set their mind too.  I’ve told them that they should wake up in the morning loving life and loving what they’re doing.  I’ve told them that if they want to realize real success in life they should find something that they love doing and then they should go do it as well as they possibly can.  This is something that I wanted to do for quite some time.  Heck it was an idea that was largely nurtured by our SVP of HR.

So I’ve taken some steps back, I’ve been “downgraded” according to appearances, but the fact of the matter is that I haven’t been downgraded at all…not from a big picture perspective.  I’ve opened up the door to a whole new world of opportunities that would not have been possible if I hadn’t been willing to climb out here on this little branch.  In the not distant future, I fully expect to become part of our company’s sales team.  I don’t know EXACTLY when that will be, but in the grand scheme of things, it will only be several blinks of an eye.  I’ll be the new guy again, but I’ll be doing something that I love – something that I am pretty good at and I’ll be doing what I tell my kids to do. Pursue your dreams and goals and you can do anything you choose to do. 

How about you, what’s your brass ring?  What do you want to do? Hope to do?  Can you get there from here?  What are you willing to do to grasp it?

That's it for today...I look forward to your feedback!

You are so WEIRD!

This was actually written in response to a post by “About the Same.”   I am a huge fan and encourage you to read her work.  Because this became as long as it is, I decided to post it here.

Those of you who know me, know I am weird, have been for as long as I've had a memory.  Those of you who don't know me...I am completely comfortable in my skin; I am me.  Like it, love it, hate it, you get me and my warts, I’ve lived with them my whole life you’re only here for a little bit, you’ll survive.

So, I realized that I needed to instill in my daughter a comfort with her inner weirdness.  She has two older brothers.  I had less practice with them so I did it more accidentally with them. 

One of my sons is a brilliant geek, barely able to find his shoes...he's smarter than just about anybody I've ever known and I can't wait to find out where life takes him. If we don't lose him first - Lose as is hhhheeeyyyy wwwhhheeerrrreee are you????  His brother is weird in his own way but let's face it, the truth is he is a bit conventional, one might even him call him a bit of a traditionalist. He's smart, successful, judgmental, but not too judgmental, open minded but not too open minded, incredibly empathic and consequently very concerned about the feelings and sensitivities of those around him.  He is a Bubba, he likes dirt and mud and hunting and fishing.  (GASP...even likes...say it isn't so...country music like his father) See he's weird too.  Just different weird. 

OK, back to my girl, when she came along I realized it was time to not just accept their individual weirdness, but to embrace it...to champion it and to shout it from the roof top!  "I'm weird and proud of it!"  We say things like "OMG thank GAWD I am not normal" and "you're weird" which is always followed by "thank you, you're weird too."  The highest form of insult between her and I?  "OMG...she's so NORMAL!"  We, thankfully, rarely if ever say that...whew!

As a result, my daughter at 11 is, dare I say it, completely comfortable being her.  She has a healthy sense of community and deep and abiding respect for those around her, she cares about lots of stuff...BUT most importantly...she likes being her...just the way she is. 

I don't know if this will survive the teenage years.  I hope so.  I think so, but life as a teenager especially a beautiful weird teenage girl can be challenging. 

The point is this,  IF we teach them early that we love their differences and in fact celebrate them... well...well then who would be weird???

Unvarnished

I have friends who write blogs, books, articles, poems, haikus and who knows what else.  I’ve personally written 3 books in my imagination. I haven’t committed pen to paper or, in this modern age, fingers to keyboard.  

One might call this my first effort at blogging, my most recent “note,” or simply my first deliberate effort, in a very long time, to share my thoughts with the universe.  HHHmmmmm….what shall I write about…tick…tock…tick…tock…tick…tock.

I’ve thought about writing about my fear of writing.  I think about those who will critique my writing – not the words and the ideas so much as the grammar.  Grammar is a butt kicker.  I happen to think that mine is better than average, but that is because I am capable of being an incredibly deliberate writer; I can buff and shine and polish a letter or a proposal or an email with the best of them.  The problem is, with this little venture, I am unwilling to dedicate the time necessary to buff and shine my thoughts.  I want them to come out as they are:  rough, sometimes jagged, with odd twists and turns.  I want to let them meander aimlessly and race down the hill in and of their own accord withOUT my editor and my filter firmly in place.

Before I go further you need to know a few things.  I love my job; I love the people that I work with (and yes I know that SHOULD be “with whom I work” –but I didn’t want to say that).  (No I don’t love them all equally and I most assuredly do not love them unconditionally.  That is reserved for special family members.)   I love waking up in the morning to go work on stuff, make things happen, help people, and accomplish things.  So, I am not going to name names, or specifics, I am not going to call anybody out or beat anybody up.  I am not going to become a blogging statistic “Rich said infinitely stupid things on the web and then couldn’t figure out why he was fired.”

So here goes, unvarnished ramblings from me... 

I recently had the opportunity to observe several interesting business situations. People working on projects and putting deals together, this is big stuff folks, the little ones are a million dollars the big ones are big…really big.  At least they are to me - any time you count with more than 7 zeros on the left side of the decimal, I think it’s big .  More importantly, everything that is on my mind applies whether you are working on a multimillion-dollar-deal or trying to decide who to date next weekend.

So here-it-is, here is my sure fired, guaranteed, or I will pay you a million dollars, plan for life long success.   

Ready?   

Think. Engage. Plan. Act.    Now you could go to Wharton, Thunderbird, Oxford or Yale if you want and I am sure you would learn much about business and would know much more than I do.  That said, I have just revealed one of my biggest business secrets.  Think.  Engage.  Plan.  Act.  I am not perfect in the execution of this complicated little process, but I generally get it more right than wrong.  As a result, I keep getting paid to do cool stuff. 

THINK:  folks, the grey space between your left and right ear, behind your forehead and above the top of your neck is your brain.  It is one of the most powerful tools in the history of the universe.  It does things that none of us will ever fully comprehend. Use it.  Feed it.  Nurture it.  Protect it.  USE IT!!!  Exercise it every day.  Think about the problems, challenges, opportunities, crises, that have come your way.  Think about the ones you are dealing with today.  There is a tremendous body of research that says you are fully equipped with many of the answers you need already….use your brain to analyze, reflect, and organize your task.  This doesn’t mean you know everything, or that you are an island.  It does mean that you are CAPABLE of answering most questions if you engage your brain and the people around you… (Don’t believe me, go pick up some Malcolm Gladwell.)

ENGAGE the right resources. Who is going to be impacted, positively or negatively?  Who has a stake in the game, a dog in the hunt, or a chip on the table? If you fail to engage these people, at a minimum, you’ll be making your work harder than it needs to be.  At worst, you’ll be arming a potential enemy with ammunition that will likely be pointed right at you in the not distant future.   Part of engaging is communicating.  Moreover, nowadays, there is just too much data out there for us to KNOW all of the issues, nuances, subtleties, ramifications, alternatives and impacts of a particular situation.  ONE of the great things about being social animals is that humans have the capacity to share data among different people and to gather that data when required to reach some greater good. 

PLAN: this means considering alternatives.  It means analyzing the cost and benefit of sets of actions.  It requires, frequently, an ability to see several moves into the future.  Planning is an imperfect science.  It is imperfect for a bajillion reasons.  Data changes.  Circumstance changes.  Truth changes.  People change.  What all of this means is this… your plan, no matter how good it is, is not going to survive.  What you do will not be completely, accurately reflected in the most comprehensive planning process you can imagine.  It also means something else…come up with a good plan and GO…EXECUTE…ACT!

ACT because ultimately it is our actions that are judged the most.  It is simple really. Think.  Engage.  Plan.  ACT.  I don’t understand the hesitation, the reserve, the intransience that holds people back from doing what they know is the right thing to do.  This is what our customers, our peers, our subordinates and our bosses, want us to do.  Moreover, if your actions are guided by sound ethics and integrity, your ACTION is not just wanted by your customers, peers, subordinates and bosses…it is EXPECTED.  Failure to act expeditiously is tantamount to doing the wrong thing.

I’ve observed in others and especially in me the paralysis that can come from too much thinking, too little engaging, planning and acting.  While I think many who know me would say that I have a bias for action, this paralysis strikes all of us at one point in time or another and we all just need to stop it.  So consider this your license to go do the right thing, if anybody pushes back give them my number.

WHEW so glad I got that out.  I feel better.  You?  Are you gripped with the desire to go DO something? 

Now that this is out of the way, for my next action…I think I am going to go take a nap….aaaahhhh comfy. 

OH PS….do you have any idea how long it took me to actually ACT and put this out there into the universe?