I get frustrated when I have to interact with people who go through life with an empty tool bag.  When I say people are missing “tools” I am referring to life’s resources that you should be using to live a successful and fulfilling life.  When your tool bag is full, you will find yourself prepared to handle the curve balls life throws at you.  When you can handle your problems properly the first time you come across them, your quality of life will dramatically increase.  I don’t know of a single person that will argue that.  The more prepared you are to handle adversity, the better life is.

I hope at this point you are agreeing with me if for nothing else, common sense.  Why is it then that so many people fumble their way through life with an empty tool bag.  Families who have history of empty tool bags continue to pass on their empty bag to their children by failing to teach their kids that there are better ways to do things.  How do you break that cycle?  I often try to figure out how I filled my own tool bag to cope with life.  It is a long term process that happens after living through different life experiences and being aware of cause and effect relationships during those experiences.  Once you are able to look at life from the right perspective, it is an easy process that is self-fulfilling.  By that I mean that the more tools I have in my bag, the easier it is for me to build new tools for new situations.  That allows me to quickly adapt to life as I find myself in new situations while I grow as a person.

A full life is really pretty easy to build if you have the rights tools in your bag.  Maybe it’s time for you to take an inventory of what you got.

Life really isn’t all that difficult.  In fact, I think that’s one of our problems.  We as an industrialized, civilized, modern, democratic society have become so proficient at playing the game of life, we have, for the most part, beat it.  The simple act of survival and even thriving with minimum standards of sucess is really pretty easy.  In fact, it is expected now.  I more than take it for granted that I have shelter, food, transportaion, and family. I will go the next step and say that I even take it for granted that I have a nice shelter, healthy food, comfortable car, and a well connected social network.  Sure I work hard, but so does everyone else, and once you have those basic requirements of survival, life becomes kind of boring sometimes.  Our wireless society has become so hyper efficient, it takes mere minutes of my time to ensure that my survival is guaranteed (and even insured!) for the forseeable future.

What does that leave us with, if survival is not a consideration.  I don’t see how we can’t get into trouble.  That is a natural byproduct of having too much free time.  Society has convinced themselves they don’t have enough time, but when you start cutting out all the meaningless things people do, you quickly realize life can be lived in far less than 24 hours a day.  over the past couple months Neisha and I have been cutting the fat from our life.  We canceled our gym membership, personal trainer, kids play area membership, football season tickets, etc (the list goes on).  It not only saved us a lot of money, but also created more free time to focus on something else.  It has taken some transition, but I am happy to say one of the things that has gotten more of my attention now is my personal faith.  The faith aspect of my life has flurished lately, and I know that is only the beginning.

With my game of life (read: survival) effectivly beaten, I look forward to a new game.  An internal game with a set of rules that I am just discovering.  A good challenge is a great thing, and my mind has been opened for possibilities.

Reality is a static thing.  Day to day, not much really changes.  A lot of things in life are zero-sum events.  One person wins what the other person losses.  Zero-sum events go on thousands of times a day all around me, but at the end of the day life is pretty much the same as it was in the morning. 

When I watch the news though, they give me a different feeling.  The news is full of stories that make it seem like so much is happening every day.  None of that really ever effects me though.  I use the term “News” in a broad sense.  Radio, television, newspapers, Internet, etc. If you asked me, I would tell you that my life is different today than it was a year ago.  That is true, but really only for one reason, I now have 2 sons and a year ago Andrew didn’t have a brother.  When my mind first starts to answer the question if my life has changed, my youngest son isn’t the first thing to come to mind though.  My first thought is on the material goods in my life.  Am I making more money?  Do I have a new car? and after I work through those questions, I then get to changes in social and family life.

I would love to change my perspective on life to first focus on the family, and then social.  Ideally I wouldn’t even care about the material goods enough to even consider them.  There is a fundamental truth here that is really important.  The quality of your life is felt through the quality of your relationships.  Unfortunately, the news has all of us focusing on measuring the quality with financial/material goods.  If I have no friends, or no one wants to be around me, then whats the point to having it.  Cash loses its value due to inflation, clothes change season, electronics need updates, mechanical equipment breaks down, and trends come and go.

Take a look at Mell Gibson.  I feel bad for Mell.  An important relationship in his life has fallen apart.  Houses in Malibu and overseas investment accounts can’t rebuild that relationship.  It’s just dead. and the death of that realtionship is tragic enough to negate everything else he has in life.  I am sure that if you asked him today, he would be willing to part with much of his “measured” success to replace that broken relationship. So why can’t I learn from his mistake and stop chasing “measured” success.  If life is a zero-sum game, then I need to stop focusing on “measured” success and make the most of my relationships.

A spinning top can not spin forever.  Where will I come to rest?  My mood can not always but most often be identified by what radio station I am listening to.  The last couple weeks I have definitely been in a 96.1 mood.  Good heavy metal rock can be good sometimes.  I think when I believe I know where my top is spinning off to, then my mood will settle back down to 92.9 or even public broadcasting.

My path in life so far has always been very clear to me.  Making decisions has always been easy.  What house to buy, which girl to marry, what college to go to, what job to take.  Big life decisions have always presented themselves with very clear, correct answers.  I’ve always only had one real choice, and that choice has always turned out to be the right one.  My success so far in life is a testament to that. I don’t remember ever forcing the answer, it just showed up, right in front of me, with no other alternative, so I took it.  And it was right to do so.  The more important the life decision was, the easier it was for me to answer it.  It’s the little things like what to eat for dinner that usually shut me down.

Now I find myself trying to force a decision to my questions in life right now becuase I can’t find an answer.  I am even trying to figure out if I am asking the right question to get the right answer.  Nothing seems to be working.  Am I panicing?  It sure feels like I am. But why?  I never remember panicing before, so why now.  If that is the problem, I sure can’t turn it off.  My anxiety is so wound up because of the panicing that there are times i’m not sure how to turn it off.  Have I strayed onto a path that ended up in a dead end? Am I standing at the end of a path looking for more when it doesn’t exist?  How do I go back in time and get myself onto a different path.  Wow, that could really be a mess.  Who wants to start over again.

Rock On Ozzy Osborne, Rock On

I think I writing this post now to finally get this out of my head so I can move on.  I got a call this morning from a telemarketing company and I haven’t been able to shake it.  The guy called like most telemarketers with a terrible pitch.  You immediately know it is a bogus phone call.  They mispronounce the name of the person they are trying to reach, and they are really unprofessional.  Why is that?  If your job is to sell things on the phone, wouldn’t you make a better effort?  I don’t see how these people are effective at their job.  They can’t be successful.  When I told this particular gentleman this morning that the guy he was looking for was not here, he got upset with me.  I’m not really sure why he got upset, but then he lost it.  He started swearing at me and was over the top vulgar.  It was so offensive, I started to laugh.  At this point I thought it was a friend of mine playing a practical joke.  Caller ID had a blocked number but the company name came up as Tucker, Albin Associates.  When I started laughing, this set him off even worse and he started threatening me.  He told me he was going to kick my ass and stick his foot up my ass.  By now I realized this was not a practical joke.  I asked to speak with his supervisor, but that didn’t happen. he just kept going.  After a few minutes of antagonizing me he hung up the phone.

How did this happen.  Why did this man dial my companies number and proceed to harrass me.  No one from my company asked him to call me, and he obviously wasn’t to sell me anything with his behaviour.  At first I thought it was a waste of time, but now I see it wasn’t.  He was full of hate, and needed to let go of it.  He realized after a couple seconds on the phone his call was going nowhere.  My problem was, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He lost control of his hate, and let it go on me.  It’s really hard when someone passes you the hate ball not to take it.  Unfortunately, evil pays forward as quickly and easily as kindness.

When people are happy, it is incredible.  Everything is good.  Happy people have more patience and it is contagious.  Everybody wants to be happy if they had the choice.  So how then, if you are in a bad mood or just full of hate and bad thoughts do you get rid of it without passing it forward to someone else?  That man unfortunately tried to ruin my morning, and I’m not going to let that happen.

I’m Not Going to Accept The Hate Ball Today

Vacation, what a great concept.  It even makes me happy to think about it and write about it.  Whenever I start day dreaming about vacation, the first thing I think of is always a quiet beach with clear water.  I’m sitting in a chair with a drink in my hand, enjoying my busy day of doing nothing.  The vision is much like a Corona commercial.

I think it’s time that we take a vacation, but I need to make some changes first.  I currently have too many things on hold and need to get my life back on track moving toward a set of goals.  Once that happens, I can take my vacation.  I think the vacation will be my reward and motivation to get my life moving again.

A few things that need to be taken care of before I can take my vacation:

1. Get the Tamarack house rented  or sold.  I need to get the house generating revenue to take the mortgage burden off of me.  That will slowly kill me if not

2. Come up with a list of activities that our whole family can enjoy that we can do together.  With two young kids at home, I have found it difficult to know what we do as a family to stay entertained.  I don’t want to push the kids too hard, but I also get bored sitting at home.

3. Set up a personal investment account and re-work our family budget to include pre-school costs.  We have changed our life a good bit since I left ARS, and our budget needs to change to reflect that.

4. Get the doughnut company generating revenue.  There is no reason the donut company can’t start generating some income to be used on long term strategy and planning for the family.  This should also take some pressure off the job search as well

5. Get the ball rolling on a job search again.  I stopped pushing the job search, and it is time to start pushing that again.  I can’t rely on Newell to come through with something.

This is a good list.  Enough stuff to be complete, but not too much to be impossible.

Man, my vacation is going to be fun!!!

It’s tough not to get upset with organized sports these days.  In Major League Baseball, the umps have just recently been responsible for a blown call that negated a pitchers perfect game as well as terrible pitch call that negated a teams ability to tie the game.  World Cup soccer is no better.  Game after game in the world cup has shown inconsistent whistles.  The USA, Mexico, and England were all screwed at the hand of poor decisions. Next I move on to Formula1 racing last weekend where the stewards for the European Grand Prix handed out an insultingly mild penalty to a hand full of drivers for improperly passing the safety car.  Especially Lewis Hamilton’s gimmick to stall Ferrari behind the safety car before he took off around it.

You could argue with me that I am just bitter because my team is on the losing end of the call, but as far as baseball and soccer goes, I don’t care about those teams, so it is not my bias that has me upset.  Foot ball and tennis both have adopted the instant replay and use of technology to improve accountability for the officiating, so why aren’t other sports doing the same?

I think what makes me upset about the whole thing is the lack of accountability with officiating.  Athletes are held to unbelievable expectations and standards.  They are told they have to improve every season.  If athletes are not improving, they are quickly passed up for others who continue to find ways to innovate change and improvement.  That is what makes the competitive nature of sports fun to watch.  Why then, do these standards not apply to the referees?  Formula1 added a professional driver on the board of stewards to provide a voice of the drivers when penalties are handed out, but is that enough?  Apparently not.  Their decision at the European Grand Prix is embarrassing. And for World Cup, they have no excuse.  Soccer players are well known for acting on the field.  They take dives and fake injuries in order to get calls in their favor.  If this is the case, which we all know to be true, then why can’t we put more ref’s on the field to hold the players accountable.  A soccer field is plenty big enough to hold an extra couple ref’s and Fifa has a big enough budget with the world cup to afford an extra couple ref’s, so why don’t they do it?  That is a question I would love an answer to so I can restore my faith in the officials, referees, and stewards that control professional athletes.

Sitting at the airport, I find myself overwhelmed by all the crazy people. I can’t think of a better place to watch people than at the airport. For mere seconds, my life crosses paths with people I normally would never see. I am now thinking about what every one else is saying about me. I am sure they think I look crazy, and I wonder what attributes people make up for me. Traveling is such a great opportunity to remind yourself that there is a big world out there! Enjoy and celebrate it for what it is, even if does look a little crazy at first glance.

I wanted to wait a day or so to let myself calm down after the race Sunday.  I am getting frustrated with our season because I can’t get my hands around why we can’t compete with Mclaren and Red Bull.  I know that Massa is not getting it done, so I have let go of him for the rest of the season.  Ferrari will have to fight that internal battle to figure out what is going on with him before next season starts.  That leaves me with Alonso.  Experienced, aggressive, and confident, Fernando Alonso seems to have everything needed to take control of the season.  Maybe that means Scuderia Ferrari has slipped up in the garage.  The pit crews did everything you could hope they would do to provide Alonso an opportunity to compete with Hamilton and Webber.  Now I am even more confused with our lack of performance.  ini the Closing laps of the race, Alsonso was able to get the car into position to give Hamilton a fight, but nothing materialized.  All season, except for Bahrain, nothing has materialized.  At some point in every race there is that point where I get excited because we are where we need to be.  And poof.  As quickly as we get in position, Mclaren and Red Bull pull off ahead and Ferrari is left seemingly missing that extra Umph needed to take first place.

Don’t get me wrong, I am really happy with Alonso’s podium finish and I very much have confidence in his abilities, but after watching Montreal, I am left thinking about what exactly it is that our team is missing.  Maybe I just just need to come to terms with the competitive nature of a sport that is often decided by 1/100 of a second or stray debris blown out onto the track.

It’s great to see that the news talks about stories that are more than doom, gloom, death, and destruction.  Here is an interesting story about a quiet old small town woman who lived way below her means and amassed a small fortune before she died.  Her wealth was not public and in her will, she wanted all the money to be spent on improving her home town, a small place with a population of around only 1,500 people.

Old woman leaves unknown fortune to community

So there is no doubt that this woman has done a good thing, giving all of her money to her community, but something about this got me thinking.  Do you think she was happy?  Obviously this short news clip doesn’t give us enough information to guess at an answer, but try to put yourself in her shoes (with a zipper for shoe laces!!!).  I would love to had a conversation with this lady about what her goals were when she started investing money many years ago and find out what she would say is her purpose in life.  Maybe she didn’t have any goals, and it was just a game to see how much she could make.