Category: Life

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Following can be good

This little saying is on my bicycle shoes.

I don’t agree.

There are times when it’s appropriate to follow. We sometimes have to admit that others know more than we do about certain things. We follow. We sometimes must realize that another has been before us. They probably know the way better than we do. We follow.

Even bicycle racers know that you must switch off leading in longer races. If you break the wind for the riders behind you, you’re using up more energy than they are. You must let them lead part of the time to share the energy load.

Leading is great. But not all the time.

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Let it go

A gentleman not far from my house has a Firebird in his garage. It’s a shelf for things to rest on during their journey to other destinations. And it harbors a major dust collection.

My guess is that it’s a source of guilt for him. Every time he sees the car, he thinks, “This weekend, I’ll start renovating it.” The weekend starts and he realizes he has lots of other things to do. The weekend finishes and the Firebird has been neglected. Again.

If I knew Mr. Firebird owner, I might suggest that he sell the car and give up that dream of restoring it. He’d then free up a slot in his garage – less snow removal on snowy mornings for the car in the driveway. He’d release some cash to be used in whatever fun or worthy cause he can come up with. And the Firebird might end up being restored by the new owner.

My point? Give yourself permission to get rid of that project you’ll never do.

I took the photo with my phone’s camera; thus the poor quality.

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Musicians are strong

…Stronger than me.

One line I will always remember is from a James Taylor song, “That’s Why I’m Here.” He sings:

Perfect strangers can call you by name
Pay good money to hear fire and rain
Again and again and again

And he has sung “Fire and Rain” more times than I can possibly imagine. If I were a popular musician, I might puke if I were asked to sing a song one more time.

At South by Southwest, I discovered that most of the bands there performed more than seven times in that one-week span. That’s not any kind of a record – but just one week of singing a song over and over would do me in.

So let’s give it up for professional musicians. Hug one you know.

(The photo is a still from a video I took of the band Tennis.)

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Archive it

We recently got rid of a bunch of books. One of them was “The World of Donald Evans.” My parents gave it to me as a birthday gift, a long time ago. It’s a fascinating look at fictional stamps this artist created before he died at the age of 31.

I realized I had not looked at the book in almost as long as I’ve owned it. So I sold it on Amazon… but not before I took some representative photos of the content. So now I can remember that lovely gift, without my kids having to give it to a charity shop when I die. And having to take the time to do so. If they want to dig through my old hard drives, they can do so. But those will take up the space of just a few shoe boxes. Or by then, a small flash drive. Or a small bit of the cloud. (But I like owning my own data!!)

I’ve written about this before: here and here. But I feel strongly enough about it that I wanted to remind you of this concept.

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A daring step

I had never seen that before – a man on the cover of Good Housekeeping.

I asked Heather if that cover would appeal to her more than their normal cover, showing a female good housekeeper. She said a female.

Why? Maybe because she can relate with the woman more than with Dr. Oz.

In any case, I thought it was a noble experiment for Good Housekeeping to put a man on their cover. (I was unable to contact their editorial staff to find out if newsstand sales dropped for the April 2011 issue, but my guess is that it did.)

What small act of daring can you do today? Even if you fail, the risk might reveal new things you would not have known otherwise. (And I admit that my headline was a teaser – Good Housekeeping’s move was not as daring as putting Gaddafi on their cover.)

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Away for a little while

Life is getting overwhelming. I’m headed to Austin for South by Southwest Interactive conference. After that, I have a huge freelance job that will keep me crazy-busy for my non-daytime hours.

Meanwhile, wander over to my right sidebar. Notice the little “ARCHIVES” panel. Dig into there and you should be able to find some pleasure in my absence.

I took that photo in Kenya. It’s the back of a human-powered cart. I know that I’m not as overloaded as some people are!

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I learned my lesson

I was about to leave the supermarket parking lot. A lady tapped on my window with a concerned look on her face. “Did you know that it’s unsafe to drive while listening to headphones?”

My reply: “Thanks for letting me know.”

Inside my head: “I know that. I’m driving extra carefully while I have these on. And did you know that deaf people drive too?”

The lesson I learned? I often have the urge to tap on people’s car windows while they are sitting with their engine running for long periods of time and say, “I have to breathe this air. Would you mind turning your engine off?”

I won’t.

Reason? That lady made me feel angry toward her. I don’t want people to feel angry toward me – and they may not change, anyhow, so it would just be a waste of my (ahem) breath.

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Humility looks good on you

(This is one of those blog posts that has been rolling around in my head for a couple of weeks.)

We were visiting some friends overseas. One of them said, “That’s not how we pronounce that here – that’s only how it’s pronounced in America.”

At the time I thought, “Oh, I just didn’t know that.” But later, I realized how that friend made me feel stupid.

I’ve done that many times. “I’ve been there, and that’s not the way it really is.” Or, “It’s bad because there’s such a better way that it’s done in England, where we lived.”

I hope I lean toward humility and not toward arrogance. And I try to remember what C.S. Lewis once said: “If you think you’re not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.” I have a long way to go.

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It is all relative

I get emails from Gilt. It’s fun to see what luxury deals are out there. Most of the time, the bargains are so far out of my world that I don’t even think about them. But it’s occasionally fun to imagine a vacation in Aruba, particularly when it’s -17 degrees (-27 C) outside my window.

This ad was so far out of my realm that I just laughed… two hours on a private jet for $7,700 (regular $10,000).

The funny thing is that I was once (and still am) like those who can afford those two hours. We lived in Nairobi, Kenya, (Africa) for five years. We knew people whose income represented about the same difference between ours and that of Bill Gates. Going out to a Valentine’s Day dinner at a fancy restaurant was about as inconceivable as our hiring a jet for two hours.

It’s good for me to remember that.

How do I deal with that knowledge? My wife and I try to be generous, when possible. We fail, but sometimes we succeed.

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