Category: Archives

The full collection of explorations.

Noticing What Isn’t Mentioned

Published on December 4, 2023

I found a small 2 inch by 4 inch piece of paper hidden inside one of the books I’m currently reading.

On it were two fill-in-the-blank sentences with handwritten answers by, presumably, Becca—who wrote her name sideways in the bottom left corner of the paper.

The first sentence started with, “What I really admire about you is…” which was filled in with the following answer: “…how you care for your friends when their front teeth are missing :)”

The second sentence started with, “At work, you are great at…” which was filled in with, “…always having a warm and pleasant demeanor.”

…I’ll sometimes do this exercise in schools when giving a presentation where I ask the student audience if any of them have a best friend. Most will raise their hands. Then I’ll ask if any of them can tell me why that person is their best friend. What follows are usually things like:

Is kind
Is funny
Is helpful
Spends time with me
Cheers me up when I’m sad
Has the same interests as me
And so on…

What’s worth pointing out in both of these above examples is what isn’t mentioned. Neither Becca nor ANY of the student body groups (I’ve spoken to so far) said anything about:

Is rich
Is (insta)famous
Wears brand name clothes
Never makes mistakes
Has the freshest Nikes
Has the newest iPhone
And so on…

At the end of the day… what people remember about you isn’t what you bought, how well known you were, how “perfect” you were…

What they remember is your character, your personality, the actions you took…

…Don’t let List #2 make you forget it.

Cut And Dried [Poem]

Published on December 3, 2023

I ask you
About your tattoos
Like everybody else
Probably… Obviously…

But why then
Change so visibly
If not to have people
Question… Ask…

Or does ink
Cut and dried outwardly
Do something
Visceral… Inwardly…

Nearly every inch
Recolored; redrawn; recreated
As if away from
Blank… Incomplete…

You suddenly smile
And there’s nothing I can see
That isn’t already
Finished… Complete…

Too late though
Your lines and your patterns say
Asked and answered
Inked… Dyed…

Another deal sealed
And the thought of us together
Filling in the blanks
Cut… Dried…

P.s. In case you missed it, you can read the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week, here.

Rebalance The Week

Published on December 2, 2023

When it comes to priorities and life balance, I’ve written a lot about thinking in terms of days.

If Sleep/ Work/Recreational Time are priorities, split each according to the hours of your day (e.g. 8 hours each).

If Family/ Friends/Health are priorities, split each inside the 8 hours of “recreational time” you have (e.g. one hour meal time with family, one hour happy hour time with friends, one hour exercise every morning).

If Growth and Contribution are priorities, maybe block out 20 minutes to read, 20 minutes to write, and 20 minutes to help somebody just because.

And then there’s four hours left inside your “recreational time” to account for commutes, screen time, fun, snoozing, procrastinating, spontaneity, etc.

I like the idea of daily because every day we do the things that are priorities… it’s a good day.

It’s usually on the days when we aren’t able to hit our top priority areas that we feel like the day is a wash.

However…

It never plays out as simply as it’s laid out, does it?

Life gets in the way.

And when it does, a simple solution to keep your life balanced and in tune with your priorities is to shift from daily to weekly thinking.

…Put more time in at work than you planned? Subtract it from another day or deliberately block time for the missed priority on your more flexible days.

…Get caught in another media rabbit-hole and lose some high quality sleeping hours? If you can’t add it to the morning, ban yourself from even viewing media at all the next day or two.

Rebalance the week if/when you can’t rebalance the day.

Honoring Imagination

Published on December 1, 2023

One benefit of having an active imagination that you honor and hold space for is you get to see things before they happen. And the more vividly you see things before they happen, the more real the feelings about these happenings can be. And the more real the feelings are, the more you stand to learn from the experience… before it ever happens.

…Which allows you to apply these visualized learnings to your life minus all the painful trial and error.

Some examples where this is particularly useful:

Vividly imagining a presentation so that you can experience the feelings and flow and make the necessary adjustments before the actual one.
Vividly imagining how various life paths might unfold so you can better navigate your day-to-day decision making before “life happens.”
Vividly imagining death so the reality of how fleeting and short life is can once again come to life in your being.

Do you have a space that you honor that’s for your imagination to roam and explore the possibilities of the future? If not… you might be experiencing more error from your trials than you need to.

Borrowing Energy From… Tomorrow?

Published on November 30, 2023

We only have so much energy we can utilize in one day.

And because of the productivity-obsessed, it’s-never-enough, hustle-based culture we live in, many of us are inclined (brainwashed) to try and squeeze every last drop of energy from our being every single day.

And while in theory this sound logical—after all, YOLO—the problem arises when we start borrowing energy from tomorrow.

See, what so many of us do in our modern world, is squeeze every last drop of energy we have… and then take substances (e.g. caffeine) that give us a few drops more… and then stay up late even though we’re utterly exhausted to squeeze a few drops more… and then try to wake up earlier to preemptively squeeze a few more (because, you know, 5am club)… and so on.

Until, of course, we’re so exhausted of drops that there’s hardly any left to give. Imagine an orange pressed through the juicing machine on it’s 30th consecutive press…

That’s you on your 30th consecutive press of energy without giving yourself the proper recovery and recharge that allows you to switch out the orange altogether.

…Hardly worth the effort.

Rather than obsess over how you can squeeze every single last drop of juice from the orange of our day… What if we focused on squeezing the 70% best juice of our day and then… here’s a radical idea… we stopped squeezing.

What if we left 30% juice in the tank for the next day?

What if… instead of obsessing on 100% squeeze today… we focused on 70% squeeze, every day, for a decade?

What if… starting today… you squeezed smarter instead of being so obsessed with harder?

Hair-Pulling Issues

Published on November 29, 2023

I’ve been experiencing some hair-pulling email issues over the past few days.

Things that were supposed to happen when somebody opts in to get my daily or weekly emails, wasn’t. The plugins and forms that were supposed to fix the problems, weren’t. And when I invested $800+ for a Cyber Monday deal to switch to a new email service provider… I quickly realized that they came with their own set of new, hair-pulling issues that I’d have to resolve. And so it has gone so far this week…

But then…

I heard that one of my students’ mom got her finger broken by her autistic daughter…

And that one of my coworker’s sisters was in the hospital…

And that one of my students’ dad passed away…

And that another one of my students’ mom passed away which lead him to drop everything and fly to the other side of the planet to be with his family…

And I remembered…

Email issues are laughable issues in the grand scheme of things.

When you’re feeling like you’re about ready to pull your hair out over the issues you’re facing in your life… try zooming out from your micro perspective and soaking in issues from a wider lens.

…Not because we want to think about bigger, badder, more heart-wrenching issues… but, because we want to gain perspective.

…So that we can ease our way back into our lives with a deeper sense of understanding and so we can revisit our “hair pulling issues” from a new head space.

…One that maybe puts “hair pulling issues” in air quotes and no longer has them bolded and underlined.

10,000 Email Subscribers

Published on November 28, 2023

Yesterday, the number of people subscribed to my MoveMe Weekly newsletter and 1-Minute Insights daily email crossed 10k.

And what did I do to celebrate this milestone?

…I unsubscribed close to 4,000 of them.

…Why?

Because for the first time since I started collected emails for these newsletters (about 10 years ago), I decided to finally clean the list.

And by clean, I mean anyone who hasn’t opened an email from me in the last 6 months was unsubscribed.

…Obviously the newsletter and/or daily emails isn’t for them.

This worked out to be close to 4,000 people.

It was a humbling reminder (the gift to myself) that quality trumps quantity in this regard.

Why keep sending emails to people who obviously aren’t getting value from them? It’s a waste of space in their inbox and resources used to send.

Better to hyper focus on those who are opted in, engaged, and aligned with us on the journey forward.

…Both in newsletters and in life.