Image used via CC license from @atmosphera

After reading this book and watching this documentary in the past few weeks, it sends home the message that I’ve been thinking for a few months: we are a culture of excess. According to this NY Times article, Americans throw away 96 billion pounds of food per year; our hard drives are filled with terabytes of information; (remember, Bill Gates said that “640KB should be enough for anybody.”); and we sit in our congested homes and watch a show about hoarding. After spending time serving the needy in Mexico this year, I am astounded at how much I truly have.

While my house may not have 35 years of junk packed to the ceiling, I hoard. I have more than 100 GB of digital photographs; more than 50 GB of (legal) digital music files; and myriad digital fragments that tug at my mind. More than that, I have scattered bits and pieces of hobbies and aspirations crowding the RAM of my mind. Is it any wonder that medication for ADD is so highly prescribed.

So, here it is.

1. I want to carefully evaluate the things that are truly important to my life.

2. Evaluate the areas of my life that are in conflict with #1.

3. Take more time to tidy up (archive) my digital life.

4. Say “no” more.

I don’t expect this to be quick or easy, but I want to begin the movement towards simplicity. Cheers.

How about you?

Feature image used via CC license.

Photo used via CC License from @miggiddymatt

This morning a situation came up, and I blurted out these mythological words, “Ain’t No Fat Boy’s Gonna Tell Me I Can’t Climb This Mountain!!” Thankfully, no one was around; thankfully, I wasn’t on a mountain, and most importantly, I was the only fat boy in ear shot.

It’s funny how life’s little events can become mythological, and as we are all readying our lives for the celebration of Christmas, I thought I’d share the origin of this defiantly optimistic proclamation (originally shared by Doug at my dad’s memorial service last year).

In the late 90s, my dad, brother Jeremy, brother-in-law Andy, and me all decided to hike up to Mt LeConte right after Christmas. As the poorly trained hikers we were, we departed for the hike in late afternoon on a snowy December day. We finally reached the trail around four p.m.

Most people appeared to be coming back from the trail as we headed out and up. At first the path seemed fine, but soon we were walking (and slipping) on ice. Daylight was slipping away alongside us. Soon the dark shadow of night was fast approaching.

The trail shifted from a smooth passage over tree roots and rock to a steep climb along the side of the mountain. In my typical less than courageous mindset, I was ready to head back to Gatlinburg and enjoy a good meal! But we pressed on.

Soon a heavy set guy passed us heading down the trail. He stopped and said, “You really shouldn’t go any farther. It’s too steep, too icy and getting too dark.” After he passed out of sight, my dad replied, “Ain’t no fat boy’s gonna tell me I can’t climb the mountain!”

That one statement captures the energy and fire in my dad’s belly. If you tell him he can’t do it, can’t win, can’t make, he’s sure to give everything to prove you wrong. Thus we trudged upward and onward. I was convinced we’d die on the side of the mountain. But to my amazement, my dad’s drive pressed us all forward, and we made to the top and spent the night up there in a three sided-cabin.

Over the last several years, my dad’s quote became part of the family lore. Even now when facing a hard struggle, one of us will say, “Ain’t no fat boy gonna tell me I can’t climb the mountain!” That one moment (which was so exhausting and overwhelming at the time) has come to be one of the fond memories of time spent with my dad.

In my memory, the air was colder, the hills were steeper, the night was darker, and most importantly Doug’s complaining was louder than any other experience in my life. But, we made it. So, no matter your “mountain” this holiday season, remember: the fat boy may have been right, but that’s no story worth telling your kids.

Merry Christmas!

I donned my costume and paraded about the neighborhood accepting bribes in lieu of retribution–trick or treat. And somewhere in the back of my mind I contemplated this act as a foreshadowing of the adult-world to come. In the dark reaches of my mind, I contemplated the true “tricks” that were occurring that night. Those days never came.

As I have gotten older, the polarity between good and evil seems more like a crevice than a chasm. Sure, there’s witchcraft and wizardry just like there’s revival and pentecost, but for the most part the imagination of my youth has met a dull and mediocre retail experience. Halloween is the second largest retail holiday of the year. Christmas is the largest commercial holiday, and while we are reminded to remember “the reason for the season,” we are still quite comfortable to numb the pain of our best intentions with another gift at the top of the stack.

This is obviously a #firstworldproblem. Our commercialism sucks meaning and polarity out of everything that it touches, and we are left with something that vaguely resembles the other. I’m not sure that I could handle the discomfort of a world any other way, so tonight I’ll help the kids don their costumes and collect their obligatory treats. We’ll all go on as if there is good and evil without really experiencing either.

A “Pennington” search confirmed my worst fears; Trey succumbed to the darkest of human conditions–hopelessness. Trey was a man of faith. He was a family man, and if you ever had a conversation with him, you likely had a sense that he was grounded. He was. Depression is not a respecter of education, class, faith, family, fame, or “happiness.” It strikes like a viper and speaks worthlessness and desperation directly to the core of those who taste its venom.

When I read Bridget Pilloud’s tribute to Trey and personal struggle with depression, I was struck by the simple gesture of her professor that assisted her off the ledge:

She asked me if I was thinking about suicide.

Yes, I said.

I was so depressed that I didn’t realize that she was going to try to talk me out of it. I thought she was going to say Go For It, or maybe Where are your poems? I want to publish a chapbook posthumously.

I was wrong.

You’re a mother right? She asked.

Yeah, I said, but you know, he’ll have his dad, and if I do it now, he won’t remember me.

She nodded. She was quiet for a moment and then she said, My mother killed herself when I was 9. She jumped off the balcony of our house. And every day since the day she died, I’ve wondered what I could have done differently.

I remember looking down at my doc marten mary janes.

Then she said, If you decide to kill yourself, understand that you are dooming your two-year-old to always wonder what was so wrong with him that you chose to kill yourself instead of being his mother.

I thought of my boy. I thought of my mother and how many times I thought I had failed her, and wondered what was so wrong with me.

And I never considered suicide again.  It stopped being an option.

We all hear a little voice from time to time; it’s usually no big deal. It might be that we feel like we failed a project, or because of a string of mess-ups, the voice says you are a “failure.” We may see that we’ve gained a few pounds in the mirror, but that voice tells says, “no one will ever love you.” These strikes are lies, that’s all they are. Eventually after listening to them time and again, the voice builds one on another and says “you have no reason to live.” Bridget heard the lies, and fortunately she was able to share her story with someone outside that gave her a different perspective and spoke truth into her life.

We have relationships all around us where the voice is striking. From the outside, it’s not always easy to see evidence of it. But our ability to listen and not always fix is the perspective that someone may need to walk off the ledge.

Recently, one of my closest friends moved out of town. For the last five years, our families ate dinner together once a week. He and I regularly had “back porch time” where we would talk about nothing in particular and everything in between. Something about that time kept my pressure release valve open. Without posturing, we would just sit outside and chat…or sometimes just sit outside and listen.

Since his move, the viper would strike a lie here and a lie there in my own mind, and after about a month the internal dialogue began to build one lie on another. Everyone has reasons why we don’t want to let anyone into our labyrinth of lies: I’m a man, I’m a father, I’m a mother, I’m a leader, I’m famous, etc., but I found myself subverting the viper’s strike until the other day. I had a telephone call with my friend and mentioned one of the lies. Almost immediately, he spoke truth into my situation and it changed my perspective.

We all need a little more truth in our lives:

• You are uniquely and wonderfully created.
• You are everything to your children despite your screw-ups.
• You are everything to your parents despite your screw-ups.
• You are important.
• You are not a whore.
• You are loved.
• You are rich.
• You can eat the elephant in front of you, one bite at a time.
• You are not a failure.
• You touch more lives than you’ll ever know.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

-Alexander Pope

May God bless your soul and you find peace, brother Trey.

Steve Jobs means many things to the world. Loved and sometimes hated, at the helm of Apple he has innovated, he has shipped on time, and he has brought amazing vision while maintaining focus to a talented company.

Yesterday’s announcement that he will be stepping aside as CEO has been a lingering “when” not “if” announcement, but it still rattled the interwebs.

I wish Steve the best of luck. Having walked the path of liver disease with my father, I know the difficulty of the journey. I deeply understand the disbelief of the helplessness that we have of such a debilitating yet seemingly incurable disease. And, yet I still have a hope that he can bring innovation to healthcare as he has to technology in the next step in his journey.

I am, however, left wondering: what is the psuedo-wiki page that someone might throw up in the wake of my own life? What legacy am I building?

Did Steve Jobs build the legacy as an innovator by answering every “urgent” email about customer complaints? As CEO did he get down into the weeds of personnel issues? Probably not. The danger that we all face is paying the right attention to the wrong problems, and that is not legacy building activity.

So, how do you fill in the blank to the statement: “when they look up _______ in the dictionary, there’s a picture of you”?

There. I said it.

For the last month we were selling our house. Then for the last few weeks, we were buying our house, but now…we are moving.

Big deal, huh? People move everyday, and I can recant a thousand reasons why it is a great thing:

• It’s tough to sell a house in this market.
• The kids are going to “love” the neighborhood.
• It’s a great place to raise a family.
• The house has a POOL!

But the one thing missing makes the whole list fall apart.

You see, every home that I’ve bought has always received the endorsement, however ludicrous, of my dad. At 18 when I had the wild idea to move out of town and purchase a nine-bedroom house to renovate, my dad said, “Great idea! I think it will build character.” Despite the fact that we actually heard gun shots on our walk-through, his stamp was all I needed to triumph.

Then when we moved back to town to be near my family, he walked through and said, “I think that’s the one.” It didn’t matter that he had reservations about the number of bedrooms–or that the wall had a cracks–or a million other things. He always gave sound judgment first, but he encouraged me in the answer that he ultimately knew I was going to make.

I’m convinced that he could encourage a squirrel to believe it was a duck, and that made his words so powerful to speak into so many people’s lives (see this post I wrote a few years ago). When you don’t hear that one voice that matters so much, it’s so much easier to hear the voices that don’t really matter.

So, we’re moving. Obviously, we are moving from one house to another, but I am also moving…

…to a place where my voice echoes those velvet words of encouragement.

…to a place where his voice is not forgotten but echoed into the next era.

…to carry on a rich legacy.

(See the Social Technographics Ladder below.)

Lurkers out themselves. On a regular basis, I will be telling a story to someone and they will interject, “yeah, I saw you post about that on _______.” To which I typically query, “well, why didn’t you respond?” Truth is there’s not much to talk about when someone tells the world that they have just eaten “the best ribs in the south,” but the point remains that you don’t always know exactly who is reading your content.

The value of a lurker is that they may not contribute online, but they frequently talk in the real world. I commonly get telephone calls from people that say, “I’m not really even sure who referred me to you, but I was talking to someone the other day and they said that you could probably help me out.” Boom! That’s the gold: when a lurker becomes a word of mouth referral.

On this blog for example, I regularly get nearly 100 visits when I post a new blog post, but I may get a maximum 10-12% of the traffic to leave a comment, “like” it, or share it in some fashion. The 70% that are still reading are still a viable part of the audience, so I have to resist my temptation to curtail the content only to the commenters.

So, Lurkers: Come out, come out, where ever you are! Let me know that you are there. Drop a comment, say hi, or just tell me that I get on your nerves.

So, the question is how can you share information that helps people:

1. Know the destination
2. Measure progress toward the destination
3. Stay on track

Metrics are only helpful when they are related to your destination. In an information-rich world, it is so easy to focus on the wrong measurement. If I am driving a vehicle to Los Angeles, knowing my distance from New York City is readily attainable and absolutely useless.

Image used under creative commons license by gjofili.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I had a great idea in the shower this morning” or even “when I was on the mower, I had a thought?” On the other hand, when have you heard “I had an idea while I was answering email today?” While weed eating, we actually have nothing else to do than think.

Several of my friends have a “lawn service,” and I feel sorry for them. They are depriving themselves of the opportunity to have undistracted thought time under the guise of personal economics–”my billable is 3 times that of the lawn service.” Here is the problem with that, most of my knowledge working friends have the input on high gear and quiet time on mute. Who knows what million dollar idea will be hatched from the safe perch of a Cub Cadet this weekend.

So, what’s your idea haven? Have you ever had brilliant ideas on a mower? (leave a comment below)

As a bonus, here’s a great little piece about lawns in the us from CBS Sunday Morning:

Thumbnail and main image used under creative commons license.