Embracing Mystery

Two years ago tonight one of my daughter’s best friends took her life. No one knows why exactly. In the void of answers, our hearts are left to presume, imagine and grapple with unsatisfying reasons. Years ago, a former boss of mine took his life and temporarily I was convinced there was something I could have done to influence his decision.

Behind me, thunder keeps rolling across the Colorado sky reminding me that only God holds the answers to my life’s biggest mysteries. Why did you make thunder roar? Why are there wasps? Why do dishonest people prosper? How long will you wait to renew all things? How old is my daughter in eternity? What happened that night?

Until we have that conversation, I embrace mystery.

Graffiti Your Walls to Frame Your Life Story

We are rebooting our life and starting over. Starting last April, we began dismantling our old life piece by piece. We sold everything we owned, sold our house, changed up our work, and made three million micro-decisions to choose to Work Live Play differently. As part of our constructing a new life, we are building a new house. We symbolically refer to the house as “new construction”.

Love and Grace in our Walls
Love and Grace in our Walls

Imprinting the walls with words of life

We are constructing a new life and a new story. Yesterday, we used Sharpie markers to write words of life onto the 2×4 wood frame walls. We want to imprint words into the frame of our new home. We believe that words reflect our beliefs and set our intentions. We believe words are the soil in which we grow our lives. Words are the vocabulary we use to create a pencil sketch of our future.

Above our bed in our master bedroom -words of life in our walls
Above our bed in our master bedroom -words of life in our walls

Why don’t we write on the walls?

We put up inspirational posters at work and in sports team’s locker room, why not apply them to the structural frame of our home? We wrote these words inside the walls to make them become a part of the environment we live within. Just like an Olympic athlete performing visualization exercises before they step into the arena, these words are helping direct the future story of our life.

Here are the words that frame the story we want to live in:

Excitement
Adventure
Decisiveness
Ambition
Rest
Love
Patience
Forgiveness
Significance
Emotional Fitness
Sustainability
The Life of Jesus
Optimism
Gratitude
Abundance
Plenty
Confidant
Purity
Freedom
New Legacy
Hope
Prosperity
Daring Greatly
Restoration
Wealth of Life
Compassion
Strength
Creative
Boldness
New Life
Action
New Beginnings
Mystery
Curiosity
Wisdom
Unity
Bravery
Beauty
Intimacy
Moving Forward Together
Happiness
Willingness
Serenity
Peace
Quiet
Jesus Life in Us
We choose Love
Love Wins
Risk

Stories I Only Tell My Friends

 

The way I put it to my friends

There are two versions of every story. The one you tell on Facebook or at a cocktail party, and the one you only tell your closest friends.  For sake of invitation and encouragement, I’m going to risk telling you both versions of three stories. I’m trusting that the invitation will invite you to do the same.

Actor Rob Lowe chose this as the title of one of his books, Stories I Only Tell My Friends.  His title peaked my desire to be on the inside to hear the intimate stories that only his buddies hear while sharing beers over a late night poker game.

These are the stories I would tell you if we were friends.

I hold back a lot.

Living out loud for the world to see, hear, and read isn’t as simple as you might imagine.

The problem with holding back is that sometimes I censor to the point of excluding myself from the stories.

When writing my eBook: Don’t Quit Your Job. Fire Your Boss, my good friends and editors Tim & Laurie  Thornton challenged me on my censorship.

“YOU are missing from Your stories. You are nowhere to be found. It’s ok, but it’s not as good as it could be if You put YOU back into the story.”

They were spot-on.

I purposely extracted most of the first-person intimate details from my career liberation, and as a result, it wasn’t that great.

I took their advice. I went home and wrote down everything I would write if only I was going to read it.

It worked!

I was able to silence my censorship filter and stop worrying about who would read it, what they would think, if they would be offended, love it, or hate it. My story, my intimate experiences, were unlocked and re-infused back into the narrative of How I Fired My Boss.

Before you share the intimate version of your stories,

here is some advice…

  • Keep your judgment
  • Retain censorship rights according to the group you’re talking with
  • Risk being known so others can love you more completely
  • It won’t always work
  • Sometimes people won’t listen, act like they care, or know what to do with your level of transparency
  • Start with a trusted few, then venture out to those outside of your inner circle
Photography by Gabe Sullivan

Two-Week Vacation

This past summer I took two weeks off work, rented a beach house in California five hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean, and didn’t check email for two weeks (I’ll write later about why we American’s don’t ever take two-week vacations). Skateboards, surfboards, runs, bikes, sunburns, friends, sand, sun, friends, and imperfection. We hired a Surfer Magazine photographer for a photojournalism shoot on the kelp-riddled marine preserve of Laguna Beach.

Stories I only tell my friends

Three days after high school graduation, my eighteen-year-old son left for a recovery program in the steamy hot countryside of Nashville, TN.  He bravely elected to commit to a six-week residential therapy program. We weren’t sure if he would be joining us for the pre-paid vacation we had planned for eight months.

The weekend before our two-week hiatus was scheduled to commence, my wife and I flew to The Ranch to meet him in a small 10 x 15 foot therapist’s office. We listened closely to her assessment of his encouraging progress as the white-noise machine broadcasted fuzz aimed at disguising conversations of the neighboring therapist.

The beach pictures show joy, but they don’t reveal the prelude of pain and heartache.

The Channel Islands National Park, California

Men’s Town Road Trips:

Every Spring Break for the past nine years, my son and I head west on a dirt-bagging road trip (I will write more later on the art of dirt-bagging) to visit a different National Park. No girls allowed.  We’ve only missed one year when my daughter Hadley, his sister, moved to Heaven.  We’ve camped the Oregon Coast, backpacked the Grand Canyon, and gone under ground at Carlsbad Caverns. The most recent was our sea kayaking trip to the Channel Islands National Park, twenty-five miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, CA.

Stories I only tell my friends

When he was in sixth grade, I decided to give him the sex-ed talk. It was terrible. I had to pull over so he could throw up. I thought I was doing a great job as a father, not waiting until his friends at school educated him about how he and his sisters got here. He can still recite every horrible adolescent analogy used by the CD’s narrator. He also has stories of death marches in desert heat with heavy backpacks, running out of water, and getting lost in the Great Sequoias. Each of the Men’s Town trips were imperfect, yet I wouldn’t trade one minute of any of them.

Me 2nd on the left-Ceremony of the Bell

Ringing the Bell of the London Stock Exchange

Two years ago, I resigned from my job without my next gig lined up.  I left because I believed there was something better waiting for me. One year after my vagabond departure, I found myself at the London Stock Exchange ringing the opening day trading bell as part of our company Kalibrate going public on the AIM Exchange. That is a story I could have never imagined.

Stories I only tell my friends

When I was twenty-five I read every issue of Fast Company magazine.  In those articles it appeared that when your company went public everyone got rich.  I remember all those pencil-neck little geeks cashing in their options and buying Ferrari’s. It turns out that a lot of those guys appeared wealthy until the bank repossessed their Italian sports car for missing their loan payments.

Here is the truth: I’ve seen too much. I’m not financially wealthy, but I’ve done well. After twenty years in the business world, I’ve met a lot of guys along the way who cashed in all of life’s chips in an attempt to become rich.  I’ve seen guys with fortunes loose them. I’ve seen startups fail and stock options be worth less than the piece of paper they are printed on. Ringing the bell was an epic moment in my career, but not worth throwing away the rest of my life in an attempt to obtain such a career crescendo.

Stories you should consider telling your friends

Now it’s your turn. What are the stories that your Facebook pictures don’t tell?

Who in your world today would hold the realities of your stories well?

What stories would you tell if no one ever read them?

Keep going, friends.

How to stick it to The Man today

Joy Bucket-Key Ingredient in Regularly Sticking the Man

Two quick requests before I divulge my secrets on how to Stick It to the Man.

  1. I’m usually pretty upbeat in my writing. If this one seems a bit grim in the intro, hang on to the end for the sunshine to break through.
  2. Please don’t take this article to Human Resources and blow the whistle on us non-conformists.  I’m not going to give you advice on how to cheat on your expense report, pretend you are working when you are at the baseball game, or the like. This is a more covert approach.

Working for The Man

For a lot of years, I worked too much and played too little. My kids were little, my marriage was fragile, my career was young, my financial resources were limited, and my vacation time amounted to less than ten days a year.

If you’ve been working in your career for more than five-to-eight years, this idea of The Man will make sense to you.

If you’re married, have kids, a mortgage, and some general desire to “be successful,” this story will not need a lot of translation.

You’re already feeling the angst of The Man.

Get ready to revolt.

Who is The Man?

The phrase “stick it to the Man” encourages resistance to authority and essentially means “fight back” or “resist,” either openly or via sabotage. (Wikipedia)

The Man isn’t our boss, our company, or our customers; the Man is bigger than all of them. The Man is more intrusive than the government. He is more controlling and persuasive than any one person, organization, or individual in power.

The Man is

  • Mortgage payments
  • Deadlines
  • Obligations galore
  • The pressure to have green grass
  • The sticker on our windshield reminding us to not exceed 3,000 miles before the next oil change
  • The owners manual recommendations on everything we own
  • The house we live in
  • The Jones’s who live next door
  • The pressure to give our kids a better life than we had
  • The cars we drive
  • The PTA
  • The pressure to live an epic life
  • The word “should”

About eight years ago, the weight and pressure of working for The Man started making my knees buckle. With every additional grain of sand added, every increase in PSI (pounds per square inch) on my chest seemed to be foreplay for an inevitable implosion.

Kind of grim, huh?

Come on, haven’t you felt this same stuff yourself? If you had the pen, you could tell us plenty about your woes with The Man.

Remember, hang on to the end.

Transition the balance of power

The Man wasn’t standing over me every day imposing his dogmatic regime. I was allowing my obligatory beliefs and my allegiance to him to control my actions, decisions, and priorities.

How do I stop living under the weight of what I’m supposed to do and start living what I want to do?

How do you stick it to The Man?

You have to start with a quick list.  Title it “What I would do today if I was going to revolt to the system of The Man?”

Let me help you get started.  Think of all the stuff you say you are going to do if you were independently wealthy and didn’t have to go to work every day.  What about that list of adventures you keep saying you are going to take?  How about those Life List items you have vowed to complete. Write them all down.

If The Man didn’t have me, I’d…..

  • Watch the sunrise every day
  • Fly fishing in Montana where Brad Pitt caught that monster trout in A River Runs Through It.
  • Travel to Italy and spend a month taste-testing the countryside
  • Live in a shack on the beach of Hawaii
  • See Game 7 of the World Series

You probably don’t need a lot of help with the list. You can see my list here.

Here is the bottom line:

We are going to close the gap between the lives we wish we had and the ones we are living today. We blame it on The Man, but we are about to remove him from the picture.

Start Small

When the Man had me down, I blamed my lack of adventures on him. Not enough time, not enough money, not enough everything. I had this MSR Pocket Rocket stove stored in my basement that I had never used. I resented the fact that I hadn’t used it on some big multi-day trip where I brewed up Starbucks Via packets in my tent vestibule.

I decided I’d pluck it out of the basement storage and put it in the back of my car.  Maybe I’d find some way to use it.

MSR Pocket Rocket

If it weren’t for my friend Morgan and his Joy-to-use ratio idea, this stove would have stayed dormant in the basement.

His shitty grin said,

Why do you care if you only use that stove on the back of your truck instead of on a bike trip in France?
The Joy-to-use ratio is all that matters.

Translated:

How much Joy you derive from using it each time matters more than how many times you use it or where you use it.

I started using the little joy bomb stove after a bike ride or a run.  During lunchtime at work, I started going out to my car  just to fire it up and brew up some coffee. I started Sticking The Man anytime I could find an excuse to light a match and boil some water.

I was winning. With every BTU I was getting revenge.  I was standing over Him for a change.

My Joy meter went up and my oppression meter was going down.

Take that!

Insert Joy Bucket

I had this white 10-gallon Home Depot bucket that I bought to use for Triathlons. I would stuff my towel, helmet, goggles, etc. into the bucket and use it in the transition area when switching between race legs. I also had this file of stickers that I was saving for the future when I could figure out what to do with them.

Bland bucket plus cool stickers = Joy Bucket

I plastered the stickers in a mosaic across its white canvas and it transformed into certifiable coolness. I took all the little pieces of gear that I had accumulated for the hopeful adventures that weren’t taking place and dumped them into the bucket:

  • MSR Pocket Rocket stove
  • Cook set
  • Petzl headlamp
  • Shackleton tea brew
  • Spare running socks
  • Stainless steel wine glass
  • Ramen Noodles
  • Starbucks Via
  • Sunscreen
  • Wool gloves from the Dollar store
  • Bike inner tubes, tire tools, flashers,
  • Spice kit
  • Pocket knife
  • 1/2 lb. of white minute rice
  • French Press & coffee grounds
  • Toothbrush, deodorant, tooth paste

The Man can’t keep me down

Here is what the Joy Bucket has become:

  • Portable anticipation
  • Serendipitous-expectant-possibility  
  • My favorite things assembled and waiting, short, small bursts of use

You see The Man doesn’t stand a chance anymore when his lopsided influence over my life has been diminished.   Now fifteen minutes on the back of my trunk can yield stories that last years. Ask some of my buddies about the time’s I brewed up a cup of Ramen or a French Press cup of Joe.

The Oppressed became Kings.

Summary

The Man only has as much power and influence as we permit. He is far less of a tyrant than we believe him to be. Find small ways to stick-it-to-him every day. I’ve gone fishing at 6 am and to my desk by 8:30 am but refused to wash my fishy hands just so I could smile each time I got a whiff of their odor.

He can only have what you allow him.

What would you put in your Joy-Bucket?

When are we going to fire up a brew together?

How to Change the World that You Live in Today?

Photo by Bonnie Courtland (Creative Commons)

We wish the world was a better place.

We wish our life was easier.

And we can easily defer the responsibility to change the world to other people.

We assume we are:

  • Too busy
  • Too important
  • Not important enough
  • Too old
  • Too young

Maybe the best way to change the world is to start with the little patch that we live within.

This video is a wonderful example of heart and art being offered to the world.

Originally shared by Daniel H. Pink.  Check out his site.

One Man’s Quest to Make a City Smile

A great podcast that you might enjoy also:

Living the Truest Version of You with Jon Dale.