An Open Letter To My Dying Friend

I have a friend who drives asleep at the wheel. His wife sees it, his friends watch and I know he used to acknowledge his chronic behavior. Fifteen years later I think he lives in a sleep-like state no longer outwardly struggling to admit how much he wants to be awake. His wife says, “he won’t change.”

Years ago, I witnessed him come to for a few months. He was thinking about taking a job that would require a total deviation from their current way of life and he was so excited and hopeful. I don’t recall the details, but either he didn’t ever really apply for the job or somehow the dream fizzled out.

Either way, he went back to sleep. He’s incredibly talented, generous, witty and powerful when he chooses to be. Decades of slumber appear to numbed his senses. You could try to talk him out of it in hopes of jarring him to awareness. I’m not sure if it would help. But please give it a try.

The problem is that he has a beautiful life with a beautiful family and a great career. At face value, it appears there is nothing wrong. Those closest to him know that his current reality is a dismal glow of the fullness of what he’s made for-and so does he.

An open letter to my dying friend

Brother, I see you and I can only hope that someone or something will snap you out of your perpetual slumber you call a life. Outwardly you could win all types of awards for most reliable, most steady and full of integrity. But what about you, the man? Where are you? Do you remember when you used to laugh so hard you sounded like Santa Claus?

Remember when you lived in the tension of what you most desired and your current reality? The tension seems to have vanished. Not because you are content with your life, but because you’ve shut down, stopped caring, stopped dreaming, stopped longing for something more. You have an incredible heart for the people you love most, yet your heart for yourself seems to have withered.

I wish you to awake. Come back to us. Don’t throw in the towel. Don’t tap the buzzer. Don’t say “this is just the way I am”. Wait. There is so much more time left on the clock. I fear you’re becoming most of what you vowed to avoid simply because you’ve given up.

I know there isn’t a magic bullet or spell breaking word to speak, but I know you’re still in there. I know the deepest part of you is still alive, still lucid, awake and curious. Only you can choose to come back to us. Only you can willingly enroll your heart back into your daily life. I’m so sorry for the pain, the loss, and the heartache. I promise you there is a path forward where you can hold the tension of the pain and simultaneously a new hope.

I pray you will choose a wholehearted life well-lived knowing all of its pitfalls, risks, and uncertainties. I promise it’s better than the certainty of dying a slow death from the inside out.

With you and for you,
Aaron

And So The Story Goes

I’m flying over the Norwegian Sea returning home from another week in The Netherlands. I attended my second week of training to become a facilitator of transformation as part Aberkyn. I spent the week at a Roman Catholic monastery, and I wanted for nothing, other than my family and friends back home.

The pace of work was steady each day, but I didn’t feel tired like I used to feel sitting in a conference room all day listening to someone drone on like the school teacher in Peanuts cartoons “wwwhhhhaaaahhhh wwwhhhhaaahhhhh”. I felt the congruence of the work with my soul. I could see so many pieces of my life converging into one. All of the hardship, all of the beauty, and all of the years of business flowing into one new emerging season.

Let me be specific. I’ve been dragging around a sharpie marker bag the last two years. In this new work, PowerPoint isn’t allowed only markers:). I’ve attended a recovery group for the last couple of years, and we go around the circle and “check-in.” Every morning we start a client workshop, we facilitate a “check-in.” The list goes on and on and on.

I’m going to go ahead and ask a question, How is this possible? As I write, I hear a rainbow spectrum of your responses. Let me take a stab at naming what’s in the air. You might say, “well, yeah some people are just lucky” or “well, you’re a good person, and you deserve it.” A few of you might immediately hear a whisper, “That will never happen to me. This is the way things are, and I’m stuck here.”

So which is it? Is it that some of us win and some of us lose? Are our futures pliable and can they be shaped? Are you stuck and foretold to stay in the same broken story, crap job, distant marriage, dissolution, or financial predicament you’re in now?

My experience says it’s whichever version of the story you tell yourself is true. Like a Broadway play, we embody the character (our beliefs) to match the role we’ve told ourselves we’re here to play. How do you start writing a new story? Become the kind of person who can embody the character you want to play for the new story you desire to live.

When we touch our lives with a lightness, a brightness flowing from a deep well of agreement resonating with God, Spirit, the Divine we can become the new story we desire. Our life begins to take shape externally from the life we’ve created internally.

And so the story goes.

The Importance of Your How

I’m watching the sun’s last shadow tuck behind the front range mountains, and remembering the importance of how we do what we do. My daughter and I just left our VW mechanic’s shop talking about how they are creatives more than mechanics. They know their craft well, but beyond their craftsmanship, there is an enthusiasm of reclamation. If you can dream it, they can build it.

There is too much emphasis on what we do, what we accomplish, what tasks we complete, and what conquest we achieve. The differentiator, the superpower, the unique selling proposition is how we do what we do.
Brave standing out.

Brave standing out.
Risk taking the road less traveled.
Stand up and be noticed.
Take a stance.
Don’t fit in.
Stop following the herd.
Believe that your enthusiasm is meaningful.
Go with your weird.

Write Down Your Goals and Stare At Them Every Day

Life can either happen to us or we can purpose to live our life. I find that by writing down my goals I am more purposeful about achieving them. I post them at my desk or laminate them and hang them in the shower. I have to be reminded daily of what I am purposing to do, become or accomplish. I want to direct my life.

As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life”. The best way to get the marrow is to suck it out.

I made this podcast on how and why to create a Life List. I stare at it everyday and am checking off my progress.

This post is an excerpt from the Field Guide: 99 Ways to Navigate Your Best Life. Download the full guide here.

Be the Hero of Your Life

Sometimes I feel like I’m viewing the world through a GoPro camera on slow-motion frame-by-frame…stop..start..pause…play. I watch other people seemingly unburdened and able to live in real-time without the bothersome need to always review the highlight footage after every play.

Sometimes I wish I could skip the footage review and not be so observant. Yet… there are these Matrix like moments when time slows down and everything is vibrant and real and happening. I feel alive…fully alive. And then I think maybe seeing life in single frames helps me extract more of the juices from life?

My GoPro-like viewpoint helps me see that we are all chasing after the same thing. We want a life that’s meaningful to us. People like us want our lives to make a difference. Sometimes we can’t easily explain even what change or impact we want to leave. We simply can’t shake the idea that we’re supposed to make the world better than we found it. We feel most alive when we are engaged, known, seen and understood.

I love GoPro’s tag line, Be a Hero. Being the hero in my life isn’t about fame, fortune, spotlights and ego. I think it’s deeper than that.

I think being the hero of our lives requires us to show up and own the golden moments, our glory, our mojo, our love, our sharp whitt, our mana “Yeah, can you believe I did that? Killer!” The stuff of our life that would make the GoPro photo of the day highlights real.

And…I’ve gotta own the scenes of my life that aren’t great also, “yeah….can you believe I did that?” All the footage that ends up on the cutting room floor, that we hope never makes it out for everyone to see-Our mistakes, shortcomings, character defects, and places we aren’t yet finished.

Be the hero. Own it all.
All the ingredients are raw materials that are useful in our stories. All of it.
Be gracious and kind to yourself. Love the people you are with. Be curious. Go searching for life.

Keep going,

Aaron

Don’t Allow Any Quit in You!

Before you turn around, ask yourself a few questions

“You’ve never quit anything before.”

Those are the words my brother-in-law Timothy said to me that stopped me in my tracks while hiking the Boulder Flatirons.

He said it as a complimentary claim about me and added a question mark at the end to confirm he was right in his assessment.

It’s not entirely true, but his observation in spirit is true.

I hate quitting. I simply refuse.  I can’t really explain when this began or what event seared that refusal deep within me.

I don’t have a story of a hard-driving father living vicariously through me. Nor can I locate an internal file or experience that explains this fire in me.

I just don’t like to quit.

My throw-in-the-towel list

  • I can’t stand this list I’m about to share with you. Even writing them makes my quitters ulcer flare up.
  • I quit my first marathon at mile twenty-four after vomiting for seven miles. I decided to eat Advil and spaghetti for breakfast, but not replenish during the Marathon.
  • In High School I quit a landscaping job after two days of working in the heat and humidity of a Midwest summer. I wasn’t ready to toughen up.
  • I’ve been on Mt. Rainier twice attempting to climb her crevassed glaciers. One time we struck out on weather and another time we got wore down and lacked the grit and experience required.
  • I’m sure there are many more things I’ve given up. Yet, I’m pretty sure I’d remember them since they bother me so much.

Before you quit you should
think about a couple of things

The pain or discomfort you feel right now will be over much quicker than you think.  

I just raced IRONMAN 70.3 Silverman Triathlon in Las Vegas. Two weeks prior, I was among 2800 other triathletes disappointed by the cancellation of IRONMAN Lake Tahoe.  Before Silverman I trained in the foothills and mountains of cool-weathered Colorado; I didn’t condition myself for the heat of the desert. Three-and-a-half hours later, the run began and the sun was in full sizzle, fry an egg on the sidewalk mode. As I ran, or maybe more accurately called shuffling your feet at ten-minute miles, I thought about this a lot. I was watching people walk off the course and give up.  All I could think about was, “Bro, the pain is going to be over soon, but you’re going to remember quitting for a long time”.  As soon as I stopped running, the pain stopped. The irony was that I finished 68th in my age group of over 400 and 371st out of 1655, being one of my best ever finishes. My race time was terrible, but so was everyone else’s.

The regret of quitting lasts a lot longer than you think.

The problem with quitting is that we evaluate our choices while we are under the tension, stress, or pain of the situation, relationship, job, activity, business, etc. It is so easy to give up when we are under stress. Just remember that as soon as you quit, you can’t take it back, you can’t get a do-over, or say you didn’t really mean to quit.

Don’t allow yourself to have “Any Quit” in you.

My friend Neal recently told me a story about an triathlete he knows who permitted himself the idea of quitting before he even started a big race. Neal said You have to have No Quit in you. I totally agree. My wife and I refuse to use the word Divorce in our home.  It’s simply not allowed in our household vocabulary. Why? If we permit the word to cycle through our conversations and arguments, then we are giving heed to the idea of quitting.

Start over

If you’ve permitted quitting in the past, then reboot your systems and start over. Draw a line in the sand and don’t allow that guy (or gal) to have any space in your future. It would be better to be the guy who draws a line than the guy who just keeps on quitting.

What have you quit before that you wish you hadn’t?

Don’t ever give up. Try something new.

No Caption Required

Jockstraps. That was my level of desperation. It was 1999 and I needed to close a deal.

It was a sales deal and I was working for an Internet startup. I sent jock straps mounted to whiteboards to five executives at a sports marketing company. Strategically attached to each crotch was my company’s logo with a succinct message, “We have the support you need!”

I’m not kidding you.

I’m laughing just writing this. I remember my CEO walking by, seeing me with my homemade assembly line, and disappointedly claiming,

“Oh, that’s what it’s come to now?”

It was during the Dot-Bomb era when our company was vaporizing every penny of our $10 million dollars in venture capital investment. We were living in the age of “build it, and they will come.” Genuinely, there was a belief that if you had cool technology, a bunch of young, energetic, smart people, a game room, stock options, bring your dog to work day, and some VC cash, someone will acquire you for “eleventy billion times” your annual revenue.

The startup wasn’t working

There we were pinning up the covers of Fast Company in our cube farm as inspiration for our future pending wealth. We were collectively working hard to bring in new clients, find uses for our innovative technology (the predecessor to web conferencing), and simultaneously outpace our cash burn rate by our growth rate of revenue.

It wasn’t working, which was why I was desperate for a win.

FedEx was scheduled to deliver each “package” by 9 a.m. Pacific Time. I logged in and refreshed my screen until I saw the “delivery confirmation.” I picked up the phone, called my prospect, and said,

Hey [Person], did you get my package?

Awwwwwkwaaardddd silence….

Yeah, we all got them.

I sent one to him, his boss, and his boss’s boss all the way up the chain.

I promised him the jocks were clean and our company was ready to support them, so let’s get this deal done.

Did my last-ditch-sales approach work?

Yes and no. My jock strap stunt forced their team to not dismiss our little company.  We were competing for their business against a much larger and seemingly stable provider. The message did get across, “We want your business and are passionate about supporting you.” We moved into the contract phase and began negotiations.

A couple weeks later, a press release was issued that they were closing their doors, selling off their assets, and letting everyone go. I called my contact and he was severely depressed, “They’re taking the furniture.” It was ugly.

Even though our contract didn’t last long, it did leave me with one burning lesson: don’t ever give up. Try something new.

Try something before you give up

I’ve always believed that if nothing is working, then try something else before you simply give up. Clearly from this story, you can tell I can be prone to taking it a little too far. I think I can help you the next time you are feeling stuck and ready to throw up your hands:

  1. Choose action over Inaction
  2. Chase Creativity over Predictability
  3. Dare to be Risky over Playing it Safe
  4. Ask for Forgiveness over Permission
  5. Pick a Fight over Surrendering

Friends, when it looks like you are down for the count, don’t ever give up. You should try something else.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend just sending jockstraps to random people, but what’s the unorthodox, paradigm-bending leap you need to take to make an extraordinary impression for your future?

[tentblogger-youtube ZmMFIganRQY]

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.

Why I Write About More Than Just Work-Life Balance?

(Written in 2014) I never set out to write a blog.

I told myself, that’s the last thing the world needs, another guy with an opinion. 

This month marks my third anniversary of this accidental creation, Work Life Play Blog/Podcast.

I am passionate about living a sustainable work-life rhythm that includes play woven continuously. I want to master the Art of Living, not merely default to balancing my career with my family. I’m convinced that integration must be our aim-not balance.

I’ve learned that my voice is best inserted @ the intersections and crossroads of all three Work Life Play. I hope that I’ve helped you blur the lines of distinction between where one starts and where the other ends.

Why this Trifecta?

This is unrehearsed, but here it goes.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking through how best to explain this trifecta. My life experiment is to become more integrated, less fragmented and compartmentalized. Those I admire the most live freely and lightly with little distinction in their work, life and play.

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.”

-James Michener

Blurring the Lines

I want to live a lifestyle where the daily lines between Work Life Play are impossible to draw. I want the rhythms of my life to ebb and flow within this trifecta every day. In my old life, I used to think

I work from 9 am to 5:30 pm.

I play on Saturday mornings or only on vacations.

I spend time with my family and friends on the weekends.

I’m in the process of undoing these old lines of demarcation. I’ve learned that a more gratifying-joy-filled sustainable lifestyle is achieved by blurring the lines every single day. I am becoming an artist of a Work Life Play lifestyle.

Work

I love to work. I’m invigorated by the opportunity to create and innovate. I’m learning to discover work I love while embracing the complexity, uncertainty, and growth as a playground for my development.

Through the vehicle of work, we can create good in the world, in people’s lives as we become more wholehearted.

Life

I believe living a meaningful life requires that we invest heavily in those entrusted to our care. Ancient Wisdom reminds us to “Love others, as you love yourself” and “learn to marshall and direct your energies wisely.” To keep going requires that we prioritize the health of our relationships, our physical and spiritual lives.

Relationships: A meaningful life worth living is rich with relationships. We offer to others what we offer to ourselves. Kindness, patience, forgiveness, trust require being deeply rooted.

I want to steward my relationships so that others thrive under my care.  

Personal health and wellness doesn’t happen on accident.  It takes a constant purposeful attention.  I want to live a long, healthy, active life without becoming obsessive about it.

I want to feel good at age 80 so I’m doing something about it at age 42.

Spiritual life: God’s life is real, and as inescapable as are human relationships. I love God, and I love people. My invitation here is encourage conscious contact with the one who can help.

Transformation, restoration and freedom are available .

Play

Most men I know abandoned play a long time ago.  They grow up, get jobs, become responsible, grow a potbelly, and settle for Fantasy Football leagues and Xbox games as their only adventures.

The world is too big, too wild and too mysterious to stay indoors.

I run, bike, swim, climb, fish, surf (novice), and I’m working on learning to ride a longboard (skateboard).  More importantly, I’ve learned to play amidst life’s difficulties, small margins of time, and life’s obligations.   I want you to play a lot more.

Get muddy, try something new, play with your kids, find an adventure, and stop always staying at the Westin and get in a tent instead.

I’ve needed to put words to this trifecta combo if only to help me make sense of it. Thank you for being apart of this emerging tale these past three years. I hope it made a difference for you.

Keep going friend-

Aaron

The Choices We Unknowingly Make

Six to Ten hours a week I chose this.

This is a post about choices.

I need to first set the scene so that you can understand how I discovered this nugget of truth.

Yesterday I rode (cycled) 120 miles in preparation for an upcoming race. Five weeks from today, I am competing in my second IRONMAN Triathlon. The IRONMAN  was originally cooked up by a couple of local Hawaiian nut jobs back in 1978.  It was a test of wills, guts and stamina.  Today it has become an international endurance athlete phenomenon.

You’ve probably caught one of the races on television and thought to yourself , That looks awful. I could never do that.

It might appear that IRONMAN is only for gifted athletes.  I don’t think this is entirely true.

More importantly than athletics, I believe it’s a race for the courageous of heart.

Watch a race in person and you will witness all shapes, all sizes and all ages fixated on their goal- the finish line.  If you chose to attempt an IRONMAN, you could complete it. I promise.

Ironman training is a choice

I want to put myself through this test again to see if I can arrive at the finish line and hear the microphone announcer say,

Aaron McHugh, you are an IRONMAN.

But this is not a post about the IRONMAN.

It is a post about choices.

It’s a post about LIFE and the small margins we are constrained to live within.

By choosing to take on this part-time job for ten months, IRONMAN training, I chose to limit my other choices.

When I dedicate eight-to-thirteen hours a week to training, then I simply don’t have time to do other things.

Here are a couple of choices that became limited as a result of my training:

  • Go to the pool with my family
  • Dry fly fishing the evening hatch on the South Platte river
  • Backpack over night into the Colorado high country
  • Regularly publish new blogs and podcasts
  • Drink beers with my buddies
  • Sleep eight hours every night

As I sit on my bike for six hours each Saturday and climb the rolling hills of the Front Range of Colorado, I’m reminded that I made this choice.

The Side Effects of my choices

I chose to race IRONMAN and this choice resulted in a list of preclusions.   I precluded myself from having the freedom to choose other things I love.

Probably like you, these resulting side effects often surprise me.  When we agree to a big project at work, sign up to coach our kids little league baseball, host a dinner party for fifty or buy that new Lexus we’ve been dreaming about, we are surprised.

I’ve been known to say something like theses: 

  • “I underestimated…”
  • “I had no idea…”
  • “I was planning on everything else going right…”
  • “I’m shocked that it costs this much…”

Maybe you’re a lot better than I am at estimating exactly what each decision will cost or require.

During my ride, I was reminded of the root cause behind why I am not writing more.  I chose an IRONMAN instead.

It’s funny I don’t remember writing a pros and cons list and adding, I will not be writing very often to the cons list.

I guess that’s what you call underestimating.

My parting encouragement to you

Maybe we chose the predicament, constraints, tension, pressure, stress, or disappointment that we are experiencing?

Maybe we didn’t consciously calculate all of the ways our decisions would affect other areas of our life, work and play?

Try it on and ask yourself What choices did I unknowingly make that I’m unaware of?

I gotta go.

I’m late for my pool workout.

Keep going.