As this year closes out I have a very simple wish for each of you. I pray that you may have hope. Great hopes. The kind that you can’t tell anyone for fear of sounding like some kind of nut job.

I am not praying that you get what you want. Looking back there are a lot of things that I wanted that I am glad I never received. I want you to have more.

I want you to believe in something; to have hope that something that seems so far fetched right now is possible.

I wish for you a drive to do the unexplainable in the name of the impossible.

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You know those days where you are in a real funk and everyone knows it but you just don’t know why? I’ve had a few of those this past month.

What makes it worse is when your friends and family all try to help you “perk up” and it just doesn’t work. It’s like spinning your car tires in the ditch. You love them for their effort but only a snarl comes out when you say thank you. (more…)

 

I love the moon. There are so many amazing sights in this world but nothing stops me in my tracks like a huge, glowing circle of orange light sitting on the fall horizon.

Not only is it beautiful, it often feels so close that you could actually touch it – and we did back in 1969. We will not be able to say this about any other celestial object in our lifetime.

This neighboring orb has always fascinated me. Many times I’ve pulled over on the side of an empty road with its radiant light directly in the center of the windshield (yes I get up early). It was always the perfect, solitary moment to sit an offer a prayer of thanksgiving. (more…)

 

Dear Friends,

I write this column with a very heavy heart as yesterday I learned that the most gentle, kindest friend I have ever known took his life.

I can’t pretend to comprehend how such a thing could happen to such an incredibly smart man except to note that life is beyond the grasp of intelligence.

I can’t comprehend how someone so kind to life could have life be so unkind to him except to discover that the Beatles were wrong and that we aren’t guaranteed to receive all that we give.

I can’t comprehend how someone that sought with all that he was to rediscover his faith would ultimately lose faith in himself.

Life cannot be described any better than what you believe in. We all believe in something, even if it is that life has no meaning. It is in that belief that forms all of our hopes or anguish.
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Dear Martin,

I was thinking about you this past week, being your birthday and all and wanted to thank you for one of the many great life lessons you taught me.

You once wrote

While I love the concept and try very hard to incorporate it into my life, it has been a struggle. I still fail often despite my best intentions.

The problem is that it is so much easier to muster up the energy to fight a bad idea when I can put an enemy in front of it. Hating an idea is so much easier when I can see Glenn Beck or Bill Maher’s face. It’s personal then and when it gets personal I have more fight in me.
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On the day before many of us celebrate the anniversary of the greatest gift given to mankind it dawned on me that my greatest gift may have come when I failed to give one.

Five years ago my wife and I were on our way to church during a very heavy downpour, the cats and dogs kind of rain. Along the way we noticed a woman standing at a bus stop without an umbrella desperately trying to pull her coat over her head. She was on the other side of the median divided road looking quite miserable.

Just as we passed, Beth and I looked at each other and knew we were thinking the same thing. “We should U turn around and give her our umbrella.”

We didn’t.
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Did you ever notice companies that stage an Employee Appreciation Week often have some of the most demotivated employees? I’ve never seen a formal study linking the two but in my short time here on earth there sure seems to be a lot of supporting evidence.

I noticed this on Nov. 9th, the anniversary of the day my wife changed my life. This day isn’t really any different from any other day of the year except that we both take a few minutes to recall a very special moment 14 years ago. There are no gifts, there are no overt expressions of undying love – just another day with a simple “Happy Anniversary” to demonstrate that we do remember and appreciate what happened.

I know that many are thinking “What a lazy and cheap bum – he found a way of getting out of buying an anniversary present or expensive dinner. His wife must be one saintly woman for putting up with that.” She is, but actually we both wanted this.
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I struggle with greatness. This really dawned on me as I was watching No Ordinary Family, a show where everyone in the family has a super power.

What if I had a super power? What if there were one skill in this world that put me in a class of one? What would be expected of me? Would I be happier?

I’ll be honest, the thought of greatness brings out little Woody Allen moments of anxiety. It really set home these past few weeks in, of all things, preparing our team’s 2011 budget.

Budgets are in essence a process where you declare how much money it would take to be great. How much money would it take to deliver a product that would shatter our competition, amaze our customers, and make our shareholders rich beyond their wildest dreams?

But we never get enough money – nobody does. That’s how the economic principles of scarcity work. What if we did? What if our superpower was to persuade the CFO to give us an unlimited budget? What would be expected of us? Would we be happier?
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It’s a mutual friend’s Christmas party and I’ve just been introduced to you. After a few minutes of conversation I ask you “What do you do for a living?”

How did you respond?

How do you describe what you do for a living? I always wrestle with that. I’m a degreed electrical engineer that became a software engineer and haven’t written a lick of professional code in 15 years of engineering management and leadership. Yet none of those are the right answer.

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Despite what I wrote back on January 1st, tonight will be the only true blue moon this year. Science is fascinating to me in that it never takes anything today as absolutely true, only a stepping stone to what is likely more true tomorrow. It’s in a constant state of refinement and understanding.

Take for instance our dearly dead friends Ptolemy and Copernicus. You may remember that Ptolemy once proclaimed that the planets and sun all revolved around the earth. The difficulty with this easily accepted idea was that there were a lot of things that didn’t quite add up and required very complicated explanations on how this all worked.

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I was an accident, but then again so were Post-It Notes and look how much better our office lives are for that.

I remember the very day that my mother gathered up all of the courage she could, probably doing so every day for the previous 17 years to finally break it to me that I was the accidental result of a short lived affair she had before she met and married the man I knew as Dad. She then explained how Dad then legally adopted me and blessed me with my very complicated last name. Apparently I was the last one in the family to know this secret including my younger brother.

What amused me most was how scared everyone in the family was with how I would react. Even months after the news I would still have relatives come up, do that little head bob that seems to always accompany the question, and ask “How are you doing with the news?” Their reaction confused me much more than the original confession. As a matter of fact I think I responded to my mom with “Hmmm, that explains a lot”. (My brother and I are total opposites.) The news, while interesting, didn’t really matter much to me.

Somehow in our world we have muddled up the word accident to be the combination of the actual event as well as its unintended result; Post-It Notes were an accident, that pregnancy was an accident, Joe was an accident. No, Post-It Notes were the result of a failed designed. Post-It Notes themselves are amazing! (more…)

 

I have some friends that are incredibly efficient. I constantly marvel as they take on a task, use no time in breaking through the barriers, and then slay the beast without any wasted effort. I imagine that if I were a FedEx delivery man, an EMT, or a just-in-time supplier that efficiency would be a major skill I would need to master.

There is one area of life where efficiency is the enemy.
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This week has been both fun and a real challenge for me. I hope it was for you as well. It’s been interesting reading all of the private email and phone calls I get about the topics. I often wonder why y’all are afraid to post them into comments. You have some great ideas and thoughts.

That is what leads us to the subject of the last day of the Week of Living Consciously – your ideas. All of the subjects this week as well as every week come from your ideas. All I do is assemble what others have taught me over the years and try to make them accessible. I read a lot, I listen a lot and I practice a lot but there is one catalyst that has moved me further than any other, (more…)

 

According to relationship expert John Gottman, “the best single predictor of whether a couple is going to divorce is contempt” Seriously? Not finances, sex or boredom? Nope – contempt. (more…)

 

I’m a big fan of LinkedIn if for nothing more than the same interest that draws me to watch people at Wal-Mart – it’s a sociologist’s playground. My favorite part is when people start performing “job nesting” – you know that flurry of activity that happens when one has decided to begin a job search. (more…)

 

I was talking to a friend, Jake, recently when the phone rang. When the caller id displayed the name I heard him say “I bet Steve just lost his job.” When I asked how he knew that he responded “Steve only calls me when he’s looking for a job.”

Oooh, that hurt because the reason I had asked to meet with him was to let him know that I was going to start a job search and (more…)

 

One of my favorite Dilbert strips is one where Dilbert, Wally and some old guy were having a lunch discussion.

 

Have you ever had one of those “Word of the Day” calendars or email services that gave you a new word to learn with the intent of improving your vocabulary? The idea was to expose something you weren’t aware of and then to find opportunities to put it to use.

What if we applied the same idea to our behaviors? What if everyday we were to all get together and look at one practical life application (PLA) and try to apply it through out the day? (more…)

 

Our house sits on a very heavily wooded lot surrounded by large oak, maple, and cherry trees. Sitting on our back porch, staring at this beautiful forest is where I write nearly all of the Stranded Starfish columns. It is here where I see the hand of our Creator at work.

Then when I peer around the corner of the house I come in full view of what can only be described as God wanting to express himself. Here stands a tree that was given to me by my wife and mother-in-law, a constant reminder of how much they understand me. I cannot pass by this tree without stopping to notice it and go “Wow!”

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If you thought that a Hidden Mickey was something they used in old spy movies from the 60′s then you probably haven’t been to the Magic Kingdom with young ones before. Better yet, if you aren’t familiar with the sport of Spotting the Hidden Mickeys you will no longer be able to walk through a Disney attraction with such beautifully ignorant bliss.

Hidden Mickey – A partial or complete impression of Mickey Mouse placed by the Imagineers and artists to blend into the designs of Disney attractions, hotels, restaurants, and other areas.

The task of Spotting Hidden Mickeys can be very addictive – there are (more…)