Category: All

When I was in high school, I read a book of poetry titled “Some Men Are too Gentle to Live Among the Wolves.” 

I still clearly remember the feelings I had and the effect that this book had on me. It made me realize that it is ok for a man to have strong feelings.  

Empathy is not a bad thing. 

There are people in the world who will try to take advantage of you because they will misinterpret caring for weakness. 

Men can be gentle and strong at the same time. 

I am firm in my commitments and flexible in how I deal with other people. 

I have learned over the years how to be myself, and succeed because of it. 

Empathy can be a superpower. 

Those who know how to read moods, emotions, and needs can control both their own and others. 

This is my source of power. 

I know myself, and I read others. 

I wrote a children’s book when I was in high school called “Edmund Learns How To See.” This book was about a boy who lost his sight, but gained the ability to “see” peoples auras. He was then better able to communicate with people once he could see them more clearly.  

This ability to see who people really are, and what they are feeling, is a very underappreciated skill. 

We forget how to really see people and work with them directly. 

We live in a world where decisions are rarely logical and technical, but we try to force them to be so. We have forgotten that it is relationships and communications that make the world really turn. 

This leaves us frustrated and exhausted at our ineffectualness.  

For as long as we are still meat-bags in the wild, we must maintain these connections to make progress. 

The complexities of the human experience is still beyond our capabilities to describe or define.  

We must go through our lives learning every day how to better work with the people around us.  

What does this have to do with coaching? I’ll let you decide.  

To me – it means that it is ok to care.  

To me it is the difference when we are coaching between seeing if someone is hurting or *hurting* during their workout.  

When someone pushes themselves physically, you can see their soul as they fight their demons.  

Does the athlete need to be pushed, or nurtured? 

A good coach knows the difference.  

We are watching over you, and not just checking your squat depth.  

It’s something unpredictable but in the end it’s right I hope you had the time of your life  

Constantly varied blog posts… 

To my daughters: 

Whatever you do. 

Wherever you go 

Embrace the unpredictable. 

Enjoy the little random curve balls that life throws at you. 

This is what makes life worth living 

It is not the planned events and adventures. It is the moments in between. 

It is the “stuff” that fills in the gaps of your life that you will tell stories about. 

You have to work hard and plan and act to make the kind of life that enables you to have these moments. 

But it is those random moments that you will treasure. 

Talking to a random person on the street. Running into someone who knows an old friend. Watching a child explore their world. 

Drinking a cold glass of lemonade, sitting in the sun after working hard in the yard while smelling barbeque on the grill and hearing your favorite song on the radio.  

Listening to your child play piano, glass of wine in your hand, spouse sitting next to you, and looking at a painting in the wall. 

You can’t plan these moments, you can only prepare yourself to experience them, and embrace the moment to appreciate them. 

These are the times of your life.  

These are what life is about.  

Be prepared to recognize them. 

Enjoy them. 

Live them. 

Do you love life? 

Is your own life precious to you today? 

Will it be precious to you tomorrow? 

Do you think it will be less precious a year from now? 

Don’t you have every responsibility to protect that life from being extinguished? 

Is here anything more important than life? 

Age is worse than every other disease.  

And yet we quietly sit by and let it take our family and friends. 

Why are you not fighting it? 

Because you think you can’t win? 

Have you given up just because the fight is hard? 

Because no one else has beaten it yet? 

This is a new day. 

You have new tools at your disposal. 

We have never been more capable. 

We get more capable every day. 

Join the fight and don’t give in. 

We need your help. 

You may just be the one who tips the scales. 

What differentiates us from other animals is our ability to control and understand our own thoughts.  

Our thoughts are at the source of all progress. Believing that your life is driven by chance and luck begets failure. You do not have good luck or bad luck, you have consequences and rewards for your negative or positive thoughts and actions. 

 If you want to succeed; believe, think, and act in the direction of your goals.  

This is not to say that you have to control every part of your life. There is pleasure in  the random and spontaneous. You can learn and grow from dealing with the unexpected that comes from putting yourself in a situation where you can not foresee the outcome. You will gain new skills and confidence in your ability to cope with the unexpected. Use these times to your advantage, and splice them into your life in places where they are not likely to divert or hamper your real long term plans. 

Control, when it behooves you to control,  

Flow when you want to see where the world takes you. 

Make each one a conscious choice.  

People have long felt the undercurrent of a greater power. 

We often interpret this power as a god of some form. 

That is sometimes the only way that our tiny human brains can make sense of what we feel and witness with senses that we do not understand. 

What if we are sensing ourselves. Humans from the long distant future who have transcended corporeal form and mastered time, space, and inter-dimensional travel. 

Perhaps we are guiding our own race in the only way that the current humans can comprehend. 

Not to interfere, just a nudge to maintain a timeline. 

We are soon to be gods, is it hard to believe that we would come back and ensure our own survival? 

I like the idea that I am my own God. I’d make a pretty awesome God. 

“To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.’

W. Somerset Maugham  

I travel quite a bit. Sometimes more than I would like. When I visit other countries I like to sample the culture as much as I can. One of the greatest ways to understand a people, is to join them at the table. This is where you discover who they are, what they value, and what nourishes them. So much of who we are comes from what we eat, and how we eat it, that you can understand people by what they eat for each meal.  

To understand a man, I don’t need to walk a mile in his shoes, I need to eat his favorite meal with him. This often  poses a challenge to maintain my paleo lifestyle in foreign countries. I tend to only do this for some meals, and when I am eating by myself I search out some semblance of a paleo diet. This is actually one of my biggest problems with eating paleo. I have been ruined. I know how good I feel when I eat clean, and it detracts from enjoying some of my travels. I find myself dreading trips to certain countries where I know that I will be challenged to find paleo food.  

I make sure to always have a few paleo packs on hand, and I go out of my way to find options that fit within my personal dietary goals. Invariably, I will spend much more time looking for a good meal than I would have otherwise.  

I am happy to experience the culinary arts of every country or region, but after I spend enough time traveling, sometimes I just need steak and vegetables. Why does that have to be so hard to find? 

There is a distinct and growing aversion among the younger generation against having a job, or being employed by another person or company. People like to equate working for someone else with lost independence or repetitive daily action.  

I think this is a defeatist attitude. Working for a larger company gives me access to the kinds of resources that I need to change the world. The pithy and over used axiom that every person has the power to change the world is overlooking the fact that a person still has to influence others to do so. Big projects sometimes take big ideas, big budgets, big teams, and a lot of time. 

I see far too many small teams with big ideas taking shortcuts that lead to a lack of scalability and real world scope.  

I see far too many people who want to hit it big fast and want all the glory so they lose sight of the big picture. 

Being part of a team is not a bad thing, unless you let it be your excuse to underachieve. You may have to consider the possibility that you don’t know nearly as much as you think you do, your idea is not nearly as amazing as you think it is, and the world has a lot to contribute to your success if you just let it. 

What is it like to wake up every morning and pretend that you aren’t dying?  

This is how I live every day. 

I am excited and liberated each day knowing that I have an eternity in front of me. 

This changes how I approach many aspects of my life, especially my career. 

I am able to find more day to day balance because I am not in a race. 

I don’t have to rush through my career. I don’t have to reach my goals before the age of 65, I plan to work indefinitely.  

I did not need my first million before the age of thirty. When I am 900 years old and looking back at my life, will it have mattered if I hit that goal at 30 or that I waited until I was 40?  

I argue that it will not. What mattered more during those early years is how I prepared my children for their futures during their most impressionable and important years. I trained myself to be ready for real long term success.  

Play the long game, don’t sprint and blow your wad too early. We have a long time to reach greatness. 

Our ancestors stole fire from the gods, we will steal their omniscience and thus omnipotence.  

In baseball, batting .300 is considered very respectable.  

That is a pretty good target for the rest of our life too. 

I make  a lot of decisions every day. I joke with my manager that my business commitment goals are to “Bat .300” 

I am really only partly joking. I have found that some people get so worked up and concerned about being right that they never make any decisions and never move forward. 

If I am 100% right 30% of the time then we will at least always be going in the right direction because I will be mostly right, most of the rest of the time. Clearly this involves a weighting factor to make sure that one wrong decision can’t be a terminal set back.  

The key is to make decisions, commit, and move forward. 

I have no fear of being wrong, I will admit when I am wrong – every time, to any person. I long to be proved wrong because it helps me grow. 

Are you afraid of making decisions? What are you afraid of? Someone yelling at you? Looking stupid? 

Are these detractors really as negative as you imagine them to be? 

The key here is confidence in your ability. If you know that you will be right most of the time, and confident that you can deal with any problems that arise if you are wrong, then you will find the ability to make the decision and move on. 

If you had to choose between being the person who never accomplishes anything or the person who achieves amazing feats while owning and solving problems that come up … which person would you imagine is more successful? 

Don’t get caught in paralysis of analysis. Believe in yourself.  

Unless you are a dumbass – then please don’t act, go watch TV – the rest of us have this covered. 

“Don’t wreck a sublime chocolate experience by feeling guilty. 

Chocolate isn’t like premarital sex. It will not make you pregnant. 

And it always feels good.”  

Lora Brody  

This says it all.  

If you are going to splurge, then just do it and get all the enjoyment out of it that you can. 

Then move on. 

Save the guilt for really bad decisions like cheap muffins or YouTube videos of cats. 

My other piece of chocolate advice is to enjoy real chocolate. Pass up the cheap pseudo chocolate and get the real thing. Assuming that you are keeping these splurges to a minimum then there is no time and little real budgetary difference to buying something that is a true experience.  

Savor it, enjoy the smell, the feel of it in your mouth, the taste, and the effect on your body and mind. 

Treat it like a good glass of wine or sex. Take your time and enjoy it. These are the things that elevate the human experience and add life to your years. 

You can thank me later.