Category Archives: Uncategorized

Attempting to find meaning in the meaningless, or ‘be excellent to each other’…

The day before yesterday I was in my 5 year old’s kindergarten classroom, looking at the colorful contruction paper backed crayon scribbles, the tiny tables and chairs, the carpet adorned with numbers and letters where they sit, ‘criss cross apple sauce’ for reading circle. It was after school, and my daughter wanted to show me a Christmas themed ‘gingerbread man’ she had made, sitting on the shelf of her little cubby, the paint and glue still wet. Since school was over, we had entered the building through an unlocked side door. Part of me wants to say, ‘that’s as it should be’, and yet the practical, realist part knows that it can’t be.

Humans are predictably unpredictable, the human mind so dangerously complex that even ‘sane, level headed’ people have the capacity to allow themselves to justify actions seemingly out of character. It is what allows people to witness unspeakable things, be them natural disaster, horrific accidents, or war, and then tuck them away, literally forget as a way to cope in order to move ahead and continue to live. It is what allows a happily married four star general to engage in a relationship with his biographer. It’s what allows us to be stern, even angry with our children and in the next moment cradle them in our arms. Humans have forever attempted to define, understand, explain and control the plurality of the mind. It’s what sets us apart from the other animals shuffling around on the planet; the need to explain ourselves.

It is, I suppose, in the name of understanding and compassion that we attempt to control psychologically broken humans with medication and therapy, rather than removing them from the ‘general population’. We argue over who has the ‘right’ to define which humans are too dangerous to play with the rest of the group. It makes me think of the young man who stands on the sidewalk of my little town, sometimes smiling, dancing back and forth, in the midst of a conversation with himself, and sometimes angrily yelling at people driving or walking by. I’ve been told not to worry about him, but he scares the hell out of me. There certainly are different levels of broken, and yet, sadly, I think every single human has the potential to snap and do horrible things to other humans, just as much as I think with hope that they have the potential to not.

So we humans will effort to root out what would motivate another human to kill his own mother, two dozen others, and then himself, as if there could be any justification for that. Maybe the reason we search for that kind of understanding is we are looking for assurance that “I’m not like that guy”. We may not find the comfort we’re looking for in the answer.

Know who you are. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Those are basic. If you have children, love them, give them the respect to expect they make a positive contribution to the overall human condition and guide them in that direction. Try to live in a way that not only won’t overly inconvienence others, but also occasionally smooths their road. Be an example for good, and if you fall short of the mark, own that, and ask for help. As much as I would like to recuse myself from participating with most of the rest of humanity, the fact is, we really are in this together.

Two steps ahead

“Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.” ~ U. S. President Dwight Eisenhower

While driving, I always watch two cars in front of me. I learned this living in New York City. You can never bet the person immediately in front of you is paying attention. So to double your odds of avoiding a pile-up you keep at least the next two cars in your scan.

You might call this being two steps ahead, and you’d be right. Being two steps ahead is a mindset,

a learned skill. But the attitude really gets useful when you carry it beyond driving to other areas of your life. Being two steps ahead is a critical skill for people who travel. Take airport parking, for example.

Most drivers get to the airport and first look for inexpensive parking, then look for any available spot. You want to get out of the car and into the terminal as quickly as possible. You’re one step ahead and that’s good. But have you thought ahead to your state of mind and body when you return? You’ll be tired, hungry, and just ready to be home. How do you get two steps ahead?

Arrive early at the airport parking garage. Find a spot near the exit or elevators, inside the garage and away from an exterior wall. When you return late at night in a snowstorm you’ll thank yourself. Not only did you make the first departing flight with time to spare, but you’ve put yourself ten or fifteen minutes closer to home on the back end. No extended walk to the parking spot. No searching through the entire garage for your car. No clearing off snow and ice in the dark. A little planning and effort at the front end normally make your life really easy at the back end.

In the world of human performance, the notion of being two steps ahead is connected to the concept of “causality“. Normally causality is approached as the ability to link stimulus to response, or “if this, then that”. Human subjects can normally work through a causal chain of up to five steps with ease.

When you act two or more steps ahead, you are creating your own causal chain. This is called process tracing, and is a critical skill when planning an expedition, an invasion, or just a trip to the grocery store. Causal process points are really decision points. And making the decision before you need to is one of the best shortcuts to performance. In driving and other activities with little time for decisions we must rely on pre-learned responses. In learning theory it’s called “automaticity“. Habit: a survival and performance skill and a good thing. Stimulus – decision – action – outcome. Hopefully a successful outcome.

Habits become part of our physical makeup through the process of myelination, the slow buildup of myelin along neural pathways each time a pathway fires. There is nothing we can do about this. The myelin will collect along the neural pathway that fires. If you repeatedly fire the pathway that choses Coke over Pepsi, that pathway will collect the most myelin and eventually become the default pathway. A habit is formed. Physically.

So the question is this: are you firing the pathways that will eventually put your automatic responses ahead of those around you? As a leader are you reinforcing the decision points across your team, or letting circumstances dictate reactions? Because if you are not you are only looking at the tail lights immediately in front of you. Yes, staying two steps ahead is extra work, but the payoff is so much more satisfying.

Try something new for the next 30 days – 3 minute 30 second TED Talk by Matt Cutts.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/en//id/1183

Can I Borrow A Dollar?

A dollar is not what most people would call a large sum of money. When you “lend” someone a dollar, you wouldn’t think that there would be any major implication beyond the very possible potential to never get that dollar back. However, you can indeed discover quite a bit about an individual when you lend to them a dollar.

One recent morning, not too dissimilar from any other morning during the course of a typical work week, I was presented with the opportunity to make such a discovery about the person I was working with that day. Stopping at a usual breakfast joint along the way, I placed my simple order for a savory breakfast sandwich and bottle of Snapple, then

proceeded to hit the can for a hand wash. Upon exit of the facilities I was immediately greeted by my coworker, who was anxiously awaiting my return so that he could ask me, “Can I borrow a dollar?” in order to complete his order as he was “just a dollar short, and he would pay me back.” Of course thinking not much of it at the time I was able to contribute to his financial needs and once receiving our food, returned to the company van in order to proceeded on to the job.

Later in the morning, I noticed he had been rummaging around in the console and while I didn’t observe directly what he was doing due to the fact that I was driving, it did become immediately clear shortly after pulling onto the job site what it was he had been scavenging for. “Here’s that dollar back,” he says as he hands me one hundred cents worth of change which had been rattling around in the cup holders of the van’s console. What do I say at that point? I guess nothing having realized that, this person felt it necessary from a moral standpoint to reimburse me for my trouble but thought nothing of it to do so with money which was simply “lying around” and very clearly someone else’s. Also realizing then that one of those other people was ME as indeed I had left some of that change there over the course of whenever.

“Eh, thanks,” I say as I’m handed some of my own money as payment for my money and simply return it to the cup holders from where it came.

Even though it was “just” a dollar, that dollar bought for me a priceless amount of information about this person.

Let the Journey Begin

Good day, fellow travelers, readers, thinkers and leaders of Planet Earth. Thanks for coming along on this little sojourn with us. Expeditionaire is dedicated to you, those who are moving and shaking, the butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, the doctors and lawyers and merchant chiefs, the Hank Reardens, Dagny Taggarts and John Galts. Stay for a minute or an hour. Indulge. Ponder, wonder and share. Most of all share. We are all here but a brief moment, grudingly wrestled from the sands of time. If you have ever passed a lazy afternoon, worked frantically into exhaustion to save the world or trod the dust consumed by a quest for the horizon, then this place is for you. Welcome and enjoy.